


brief sexual fantasies involving terrible women

by nice-nereesa (vice_vereesa)



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: 2020 got me craaazy, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bisexual Female Character, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Explicit Sexual Content, F/F, Femslash, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Mental Health Issues, POV Multiple, Polyamory, Swearing, everyone is touch starved and that's also a 2020 mood, im gonna try an OW character study can yall believe me, not as edgy as it looks, or more like attempts of humour lets be real
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-10
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:13:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 27,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27496996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vice_vereesa/pseuds/nice-nereesa
Summary: It is a lie. There's nothing brief about this spell of insanity fuelled by her loneliness, her desire for control and her compulsive need to ruin everything she has ever worked for.OR: Angela wants to save Amélie. Ashe wants to save Angela. Amélie just wants agency. They all fall together in ruinous ways.
Relationships: Elizabeth Caledonia Ashe/Angela "Mercy" Ziegler, Elizabeth Caledonia Ashe/Widowmaker | Amélie Lacroix, Elizabeth Caledonia Ashe/Widowmaker | Amélie Lacroix/Angela "Mercy" Ziegler, Widowmaker | Amélie Lacroix/Angela "Mercy" Ziegler
Comments: 166
Kudos: 170





	1. Angela

**Author's Note:**

  * For [UninspiredPoet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/UninspiredPoet/gifts).



> Special thanks to my friends who bombed me with a lot of erotica in an attempt to get me into this fandom. It worked! Who would've thunk. Cheers, girls!  
> (this is not a public call for unsolicited erotica btw do NOT send me stuff ever or i'll cry)

“I don’t know how to tell you this in a way that sticks,” her psychologist, Dr Singh, says and closes her notebook, levelling Angela with a stare that should be admonishing but the effect is lost on her. Her ability to feel shame left the Solar System a decade or so ago and it isn’t even a singular fun or sexy memory, just years upon years of moral compromises. 

“Are you saying that I’m slow on the uptake?” Angela takes a sip of her water and uncrosses her legs and she doesn’t miss Dr Singh looking at her with an expression that would let out a weary sigh if it could talk, all forty-five or so years of her catching up with her at once and ending up in a single vertical line of depression between her furrowed brows.

“No,” Dr Singh says. “I’m saying that you want to misinterpret me and keep doing the same thing, again and again, hoping for a different result.”

“Isn’t that insanity?”

“Only according to Einstein.”

“He never said that,” Angela says. “It’s a common misattribution–”

“My point is–” Dr Singh shuts her off with a wave. “You need to accept that you can’t save everyone. Sometimes, you need to let people go.”

“Nine out of ten of my patients would take offence at that.”

She wants to add that the ratio is only not 10/10 because she sometimes self-diagnoses too and she has already let herself go but she knows that Dr Singh doesn’t find her funny so she lets the quip die inside her. 

Dr Singh pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose and, for a second, Angela thinks she will indulge her and let out the tiniest, most professional of all chuckles but she only says, “Angela, I’m quite serious. I know you have fantastic, selfless motivations”–her words fall from her mouth in a manner so fundamentally insincere that Angela finds herself having to squash down a laugh–“but this... _interest_ you have–”

“You can say ‘obsession’, you know,” Angela interjects. “I’m sure you wanted to.”

“That’s not an accurate term and you know it.” Dr Singh takes off her glasses and puts them on the coffee table next to the pitcher of water and Angela has to wonder if she is about to end their professional relationship. Finally. “You are being difficult on purpose today.”

“I am not partial to this topic,” Angela says. 

“And I know that.” Dr Singh drums her fingers on the cover of her notebook but she doesn’t open it again and she doesn’t scribble down a quick note, even though her eyes linger on it and her thumb rolls over the top button of her ballpoint pen and Angela knows she is dying to click it. “It is my job to keep bringing it up, however, no matter how much it annoys you.”

“You are going to annoy my PTSD out of me?” Angela says and then finishes her water. “That’s a little unorthodox.”

She considers being annoying too and putting her glass onto the lacquered oak table. It would leave a ring of water and someone would have to grab a cloth to dry it up and it wouldn’t be her. She puts it on her coaster instead.

“Well, you are an unorthodox client,” Dr Singh says and pours herself a glass of water too. She is agonisingly slow, as though she wants to bait Angela to say something, _anything_ , to fill the intermezzo in their session.

“Amélie Lacroix didn’t give me PTSD.”

And it is true too. Amélie Lacroix is only a single dot in a continuous line. A slope, really, downwards, straight into whatever state she is currently in.

“I suppose so,” Dr Singh agrees, “but she is a symptom of it.”

Angela purses her lips and only nods at her because a scoff is already laying siege to her throat and she has to apply superhuman strength to keep it at bay and keep everything from imploding. Dr Singh is the fourth therapist she is taking for a spin this year and it is only July. She has a terrifying feeling brewing in her windpipe, somewhere south of the ongoing siege, telling her that she is the One and she should hold onto her, the rarer-than-a-unicorn psychologist who sees through all her accumulated bullshit and will, eventually, force her to become a functioning human being again.

Despite all that, Singh is wrong.

Amélie Lacroix is not a symptom.

Elizabeth Caledonia Ashe _is_.

***

_two months ago_

“I just want my–ke back.”

Ashe’s voice breaks up and turns into static noise and then her face, plastered all over Angela’s smartwatch screen, freezes into a half-smirk that makes her look sleazy before she gets cut off. In the sudden darkness illuminated only by the brightly burning end of Jesse’s cigar, Angela can see the phantom colours of Elizabeth Caledonia Ashe everywhere she looks, scorched straight into her retina. She rolls her eyes.

“She wants her bike back,” she repeats, very helpfully, and Jesse huffs.

“Bike? Are you sure? Maybe she said dy–”

She slaps his shoulder with the back of her hand before he could finish and he yelps on instinct. Angela is pretty sure it hurts her more than it could ever hurt him.

“She could have anything but here she goes: coveting my bike,” Jesse mumbles around his cigar. 

“Ask Winston for a new one, I’m sure our budget can handle it,” Angela says and checks the signal on her watch again – completely dead. “Are we in a lead coffin?”

“Pretty much.”

“Do we _not_ need back up?” Angela asks and taps the screen one last time. “Because we won’t get any this way.”

Jesse turns on the flashlight attached to his cowboy hat and shrugs as he says, “Ashe is a businesswoman, not an idiot. She doesn’t want Overwatch agents crawling all over her.”

 _I suppose she only wants you crawling all over her_ , she wants to say because she knows it would irritate Jesse, maybe as much as it irritates her. She lets the words sit on her tongue but she doesn’t release them. She isn’t sure where she stands with him after all these years of patchy contact and never taking the time to catch up until they were both thrown right back in the middle of the very angry beehive called “world politics” and trying to not get swallowed up by the swarm. Doing the right thing, the good thing, the upstanding thing, or whatever makes her sleep easier at night. Tonight, it is fumbling through a damp and musty tunnel that supposedly leads to an abandoned safe house somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Angela feels positively _insane_. 

“This could be a trap,” she reminds him.

“It’s not.”

“You don’t know that.”

“And you do? Then why did you volunteer to come?” He adjusts his hat and they lose the light. Angela immediately kicks into a baseball-sized stone and sends it slamming into the metal wall. The stone ricochets with a deep clang that echoes through the tunnel, much like Angela’s swearing breaking free before she could rein it in.

“Futzing around? Really?” He laughs then, a deep, rumbling sound. “Does working as a borderless doctor age you thrice as fast?”

“I said _fotze_ ,” she says and limps on, determined to leave him guessing, “and it is Doctors Without Borders and I’m _not_ affiliated with them.”

“I know. Angela, I _know_ ,” he says and he sounds apologetic and it grips something inside her. “It was a joke. I am trying to alleviate whatever this tension is.”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m a bit in my head.”

There’s nothing else to say. Angela doesn’t know how to tell him how weird being back in commission is, how weird it is that she cannot confide in him anymore, how she cannot tell him she only volunteered because she wanted to do something, be useful, and the only other available mission would’ve put her up against _her_ (and she absolutely can’t _fucking_ go there). 

“More like Ashe got in your head,” he says and before Angela could protest, he continues, “I’m not blind. I know you two…”–he trails off then and whistles a low tone–“have unfinished business together.”

“Must you do this?” Angela moans out. “That was almost ten years ago, Jesse. Trust me, it didn’t even cross my mind.”

“If you say so.”

“I say so,” she lies and then lies some more, “I wouldn’t even remember it if you didn’t keep bringing it up.”

***

_“almost ten years ago”_

  
  


“Gabe…”

“No, Angela, _listen_.” Reyes sounds desperate and Angela knows it is a well-calculated act to make her roll over like a dog. Still, she is glad she isn’t on video chat with him because she can’t handle his pleading face. There is something wrong about him attempting a puppy face, kind of like a dream that isn’t a nightmare per se but slightly disturbing and offputting nonetheless and it makes her break out in a sweat. “Sooner or later someone will decipher that flash drive and we need to get ahead of that. We must get that data, you know I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t important.”

“Of course, I understand,” she says and, truthfully, she doesn’t care, “but I’ve been trying to disentangle myself from Overwatch for a while now and the last thing I want is to get caught up in whatever you are doing.”

“You are not ‘getting caught up’, don’t worry,” he says and Angela isn’t convinced. “I’m asking you to escort McCree because the moment he opens his stupid mouth, he is made.”

Angela sighs and then bites down on the side of her thumb, a nervous tick she picked up a few years ago until it hurts enough to raise her from her stupor. She can already see it coming: she is going to be sentimental. Reyes knows this too. 

_How well played._

She has known Jesse since they were barely adults and they spent a significant portion of their lives orbiting each other like two strangely incompatible satellites. Sending off weird, jumbled messages about potential dates or maybe-possibly-perhaps hooking up that neither could decode until they got tired of their miscommunication and decided that they were better off as friends. And they were. So much better. Where Jesse fell in love and fell in bed with every person he met, Angela was guarded by fifty layers of self-preservation. Never willing to make a move, never willing to risk her heart or her sanity, always putting the Cause ahead (with a capital “c”), always lonely, always _successful_. She anchored him and he coaxed her out of her shell in return. They evened each other out. Now, she supposes, she has to be an anchor yet again because Jesse is spiralling down the drain in a tub called “Blackwatch” and no one else is throwing him a lifejacket.

“His German accent is pretty unconvincing,” she agrees. “For the record, mine should be too. I don’t speak _Swäbisch_.”

“You’re still a better bet than him,” he says and Angela can’t argue with that. “Look, you are already in Stuttgart, you are capable and, most importantly, McCree trusts you. We don’t have an option B.” 

“So, I’ll just have to mingle with war criminals and pretend that I’m some Swiss heiress with money to burn and a penchant for bloodshed?”

“You already have it all down,” he says and laughs a little, his low voice rumbles deep in Angela’s ears. “You go in, eat some cocktail shrimp, down some champagne, play some blackjack or whatever rich assholes do at casinos,” Reyes says, “and when the time comes, you bid on the Volskaya flash drive.”

“Shouldn’t I bid on something else too?” She asks. “It’s a bit suspect when some nobody arrives at your private auction and only wants one thing.”

The line goes silent for a long moment and then Reyes says, “Point taken. Do whatever feels right.”

Angela wants to tell him that none of this feels right but she cuts the line instead and dials Jesse.

***

She spots Jesse at the blackjack table and she nearly misses him. He looks dapper, albeit underdressed in a black suit and a bow tie, and his slicked-back hair makes Angela do a double-take. 

“ _Du bist wunderschön, mein Schatz,_ ” he says after he throws in his cards and scrambles off his chair. Angela wants to crawl under a table and die.

“Just...Don’t.”

“What?” Jesse shrugs and takes two martinis from an omnic butler in a tuxedo as he passes the pair of them and then hands one over to Angela. “I thought my enunciation was pretty good.”

“It wasn’t.” She clinks their glasses together and downs her drink in one go and Jesse snorts at the display.

“You do look nice, though,” he says as he reaches over to scoop up the olive she left untouched. “Black suits you.”

He doesn’t elaborate so Angela can’t tell if he means her hair or her dress but she takes the compliment anyway because it’s been a while since she felt worthy of appreciation outside her job. Despite what she tends to tell herself – that desirability is not the goal and her worth is not measured by surface-level attraction, sometimes she does like to be reminded that she is a whole, entire, warm-blooded woman behind the surgical mask and under the apron and–

She looks at the omnic butler again, the way he idles by some guests and engages in small talk, one hand holding up his plate of drinks, the other planted on his hips. 

_How human_ , she thinks.

 _What do I know_ , she thinks.

“Well, black suits you a lot less, wouldn’t you say?” She says and watches as Jesse pulls a face before he moves to drop the olive pit in an ashtray. “But you clean up well. I’m shocked you got rid of the beard, though. I thought it was superglued on.”

“Well, I guess that’s my flavour of incognito,” he whispers. “I haven’t gone for the clean-shaven look since–”

“Jesse McCree,” comes a voice with a distinct twang with each syllable drawn out, and they spin around in synch to face the source like two amateurs, “Been a while.”

 _She’s beautiful_.

Angela’s thoughts punch her in the jugular as she looks over the woman dressed in red, tapping her index finger to the side of her champagne flute, and she wants to scold herself. So stupid, so inappropriate. After all, she is in a room chock full of people who are all various levels of atrocious: mafia members, money launderers, art thieves, smugglers and drug lords. There’s even one guy who set up a Ponzi scheme and defrauded an entire Midwestern city. This woman, stunning she may be, is going to fall into one of those categories and Angela can only hope she is some garden variety bank robber and not a human trafficker because she doesn’t want to have that on her conscience. 

_Angela Ziegler, medical researcher, frontline medic, owner of brief sexual fantasies involving terrible women._

For that, she blames her multiyear romantic drought and however long it has been since she slept with anyone in a fashion that didn’t leave her high and dry.

“Ashe,” Jesse says and he looks pained before he collects his face back up into neutrality. “I see you move in new circles.”

“Not a circle. It’s a spiral and it’s going way up,” she says. “I thought you were running with cops now.”

“You know me,” he says. “It took me only a month to land myself back in jail.”

“You couldn’t lie yourself out of a bucket.” Ashe leans forwards and lowers her voice. “I could get the security on your sweet ass in seconds, you know that, right?”

“Would that be a satisfying conclusion to our business?” He says and proceeds to sip his martini as though none of this bothers him but Angela can feel the soft, rhythmic tapping of his boots against the wooden floors.

“Eh, you got me there. I like a more hands-on approach.” Ashe reaches over to clink her glass to Angela’s empty one and flashes a smile at her as she goes. “I’ll have my revenge, sooner or later. Cheers to that.”

“We don’t want trouble,” Jesse says. “I won’t cross you if you won’t cross me.” 

Ashe nods at that and gives Angela a once-over that is drawn-out enough to be infuriating, then she says, “Introduce me to your _boss_ , would you?”

Angela doesn’t know if it’s a genuine mistake or this woman is only playing with her head, messing with their dynamics on purpose to throw Jesse off but a small part of her, the one thirsty for recognition, enjoys it.

“Elizabeth Ashe–”

“Elizabeth _Caledonia_ Ashe,” she corrects him. “But you can call me ‘Calamity’ if you will.”

“I don’t think I will,” Angela says.

“–this is Astrid Winzenried from Bern.”

“The hell she is but I’ll indulge y’all,” Ashe says. “Nice to meet you, Ms Astrid Not-A-Cop.”

“I really am not a cop,” Angela presses the words through her teeth and past her lips drawn into a tight grin.

“If you say so.”

“I say so,” she says and signals a waiter for another martini.

  
  


***

Ashe doesn’t blow their cover. If anything, she is a godsend – the most authentic accessory Angela could hope for, especially now, when she is kibitzing her texas hold ‘em game, sitting behind her and looking over her shoulder, whispering about probability and the art of bluffing, too close for comfort. Angela doesn’t mind her goosebumps and she doesn’t mind her skin prickling because Ashe is a businesswoman and she knows how to sell her too, as her criminal partner, her squeeze, her wife, she isn’t sure anymore, but it works and she is a hot commodity now. Ashe would deserve an Academy Award for her performance, even if her only muse is Jesse’s never-ending eye-rolling. Jealousy and spite bring the best out in her, apparently, and Angela isn’t about to complain. 

“Go ahead and end him,” Ashe murmurs into her ear and Angela is every bit the hero she is: she doesn’t shudder, she doesn’t let the sigh out of her chest no matter how much it presses against her lungs, she only allows the faintest flutter of her eyelids. She deserves some kind of an award too.

“All in,” Angela announces and pushes her chips towards the middle of the table. 

Ashe hums at that, then she pulls her gun out of her purse. A quick silence falls upon the table and Angela can see the other players shift in their seats. The dealer sways somewhat as his right hand inches towards the small of his back, going for a handgun tucked away in his cummerbund, Angela’s certain. The man, her main rival, or so she likes to think, a beefy Russian with rosacea and three-hundred pounds of muscle, puts his palms on the table, ready to rise. Then, as if on cue, Ashe reaches an arm over Angela, the skin of her forearm breezing past her cheek, touching it so lightly she could almost think it an accident, and tosses the gun atop the pile. 

“It’s an investment,” she says and the entire room seems to exhale. A sonic boom.

“I fold,” says the omnic woman in a caftan sitting across Angela and she throws her cards in. She was never a threat; for someone with no discernible facial expressions, she sure can’t bluff to save her life.

The Russian looks at Angela, at Ashe, at the gun too and then takes off his Doxa – it’s a chunky and complex piece, an impractical status symbol – and adds it to the pot, as gently as though he’s cradling his own child and guessing by the amount of sweat that leaves his pores at its departure, Angela thinks it may as well be just that.

“All in,” he grunts then, as an afterthought.

He has two pairs.

Angela has three of a kind.

***

Gabriel Reyes told her to do whatever feels right.

He probably didn’t envision this outcome. Nevertheless, it feels right.

“You can have it,” she says, looping the watch around Ashe’s free hand, the one that isn’t busy drawing the alphabet across Angela’s chest, her fingertips sliding over her breasts in seemingly slow motion like it is some home-made martial art movie and she is just waiting for the double speed edit. It is _infuriating_. Half of Angela’s brain wants to tell her to get on with it because they have a midnight auction to attend but the other, more dominant, needy part tells her to shut up and enjoy this torture while it lasts. With that, she has nearly run out of brain capacity and it might be a blessing this time. Otherwise, she’d have to think more about her circumstances, how she is lonely and desperate and unprofessional enough to be half-naked with her back to a supply closet wall at a casino, her dress pooling around her waist. How she is about five minutes of foreplay away from a strange woman fingering her who is definitely on some Overwatch most wanted list, who may or may not be Jesse’s ex, who is currently making her legs tremble like she is some doe on the interstate at four in the morning in direct reflector light. She might get hit too.

“I’m more of a Patek Philippe girl myself,” she adds when Ashe slides her other hand, now adorned with the Doxa, from her shoulders to her neck – _deltoid, trapezius, platysma_ – and when Angela swallows, her throat tightens under her fingers. Ashe must feel it too because she moves to cup her jaw instead and it takes a lot of self-restraint to not lean into that touch.

“I didn’t know you were _that_ kind of a rich girl,” Ashe says and laughs. “Do you want me to burglarise your place? I’m free this weekend.”

“You are hilarious.” Angela grasps the hand on her chest and presses it into her skin and Ashe’s long, cool fingers splay so beautifully against her heated skin, she almost wishes she could see herself with Ashe’s eyes. She doesn’t recognise her own need anymore. It would be nice to get a repeat introduction. “I don’t give a fuck about watches.”

“You wanted to reward me, I get it,” Ashe muses and pinches her nipple, just a bit, and it is way too soft to hurt, and if Angela lets her mind spin out of control, she can even read some tenderness into her motions. “I did quite a good job, didn’t I.”

“You did,” she sighs out. “Wait, is this your _thing_? You get off on praise?”

“Give credit where credit is due,” Ashe says and snakes a hand to the back of Angela’s left knee and pulls at her leg. “That’s my philosophy.”

Angela hooks her leg over Ashe and with that simple, fluid motion that feels rehearsed, they are hip to hip, chest to chest, cheek to cheek. She hasn’t had that in so long: the solid warmth of a body against hers, the beat of someone else’s heart in her ribcage. Even the callouses, she thinks, on Ashe’s palm feel goddamn _intimate_. If she was a tad less sober, she would sob at that realisation.

“I’ll certainly credit you,” Angela whispers against her chin. “I’ll name you in my report.”

“You’ll tell them you ran into a bit of a calamity?”

“Oh, you are fast.” She kisses her chin then and Ashe inclines her head, enough to press their lips together and it isn’t a searing kiss. There’s nothing romantic about it and yet, Angela’s head is heavy and her pulse is Chopin’s _Minute Waltz_.

“I can be faster,” Ashe says and pulls away to look at her watch. “We only have twenty minutes.”

“I can work with that,” Angela says.

And she does. Twice.

And as she comes back to reality, she thinks this would be all the more gratifying if it wasn’t only about getting back at Jesse McCree.

***

_two months ago_

“Jesse McCree,” Ashe drawls and dramatically spins around in her chair to face them. “Been a while.”

The years have been good to Ashe or, perhaps, it is the clothes. She looks more in her element in her loose shirt and her vest and her cowboy hat than she did in her gown back in Stuttgart, ten or so years ago, in the half-light of the supply closet, surrounded by bottles of lye. She considers telling her that with those exact words. She doesn’t. 

“How long have you been sitting there?” Angela says and looks over at Jesse who is messing with his headlight instead of looking at them.

“Not too long,” Ashe says. “I could hear you coming from a mile away so I had all the time in the world to prepare. Did someone kick the wall?”

“I kicked a stone,” Angela says and walks up to the crate next to Ashe that hopefully contains the black market weapons they came for.

“Did you break a toe?”

“I did not.”

“I’m glad to hear that.” Ashe fiddles with her hat and then adds, “It’s a pain in the ass I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies and you don’t even breach my top ten.”

Somewhere, underneath her clipped replies and her fifty layers of utter bullshit, where she is drowning in idle nostalgia, Angela would prefer if this exchange wasn’t mere courtesy between old adversaries. It’s delusional, of course; they both went on with their lives after Stuttgart, or so Angela assumes. She sometimes reads a report here and there but she has made sure to skip out on any mission against the Deadlock Gang, much like how she steers clear of Talon now because that is what she does best. Avoidance. Evasion. 

“I knew you were a blonde, _Astrid_.”

“Well, you would,” Angela answers too-quick and Jesse groans behind her.

Ashe gets out from behind her office table that was obviously put there as an elaborate joke because the safe house is nothing but an empty barn with a few lightbulbs hanging freely to provide some lighting. 

“Let me help you with that,” she says and grabs the crowbar propped against the side of the crate to pop the lid open with it. 

Angela doesn’t sneak a peek. She is looking at Ashe’s wrist, at the Doxa that looks like it was shot at an odd angle, its glass cover shattered into pieces but held together by what she assumes to be resin. It is matte now, no longer reflecting the orange glow of the lamps. She doesn’t know how to feel about the possibility that maybe, just maybe, nothing had anything to do with Jesse McCree or vengeance. She chose this mission because she thought she would be less affected. Her life is really quite funny.

“So”–Ashe follows her gaze to her hand and her brows twitch so slightly Angela wonders if she imagined it–“where did you park my bike?”

Jesse is burning a hole into her skull now and she wants to tell him that he is wrong _,_ that there’s nothing unfinished about this business and that she can, in fact, let people go. But she doesn’t because out of the three of them, Ashe is the only one who isn’t a hopeless liar. As she is staring Angela down, daring her to flinch, looking almost _kind,_ she is the most masterful of all the liars.


	2. Ashe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ashe is in love. It is a terrifying reality. She copes with the only way she can: with sex and crude humour and dying inside.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is exactly what it sounds like. Pretty much just sex and being weird about feelings. Also, Amélie.  
> Thank you for the kudos and the comments, cheers!

_a single week ago_

Angela stares down at her own hands on Ashe’s chest as she is tracing circles around her nipples with her thumbs. Even with her nerve endings on edge, Ashe can only think about how she looks downright holy as the low rays of the sun ignite her. Angela is burning yellow and orange, the light bounces off her hair, a few of her strands are an image of copper, and her unbuttoned white shirt is thin enough to appear translucent. She shrugs it off and lets it fall on the bed, next to Ashe’s abandoned tanktop (she lost her boots and her jeans in the hallway half an hour ago).

“Roll over,” Angela says and pats her stomach to urge her on, and Ashe is glad for those extra leg raises she implemented into her workout routine yesterday. She has a lot of thoughts about vanity and hubris, courtesy of her parents, mostly how they thought that she should’ve conducted herself with more humility to avoid a century of purification by hellfire. Nevertheless, she wants Angela to think of her abdominal muscles as a gift from the Lord himself, explicitly created for Dr Angela Ziegler’s enjoyment.

“Do I look ugly when I come?” she says and it is only _mostly_ a joke. “Would you rather just look at my ass?”

“No,” Angela says. “I wanted to give you a back massage.”

_Oh._

That’s new. That’s intimate. Well, it would be, if they were anyone else, just two completely ordinary women with completely unremarkable backgrounds and personal history, but they aren’t, and it is just as well. 

_We never would’ve met any other way._

That is new too – she has always had these ideas (or so she thinks), idly sitting on her minuscule brainstem, never bothering to manifest into actual thoughts but tickling her mind anyway. It is about probability and possibility, how those concepts measure up to the fact that she most likely met the love of her life (or so she thinks) by accident and she made love to her on the very same day. Not that Angela had any clue, not that _Ashe_ had any clue, for that matter. Then, she spent ten years trying to recreate that accident, hoping that Angela would be the one to pursue her, to take her in, to foil her “evil” plans. Normal people would’ve given her a phone call. Hindsight is _terrifying_.

Her watch presses heavily into her wrist as she follows Angela’s instructions to get on her belly and as she snakes her arms under her pillow and sinks headfirst into it, the goose feather filling heats up her face way too fast. It’s not a plausible explanation for the state that she is in, but it is a good enough lie. She feels nebulous, and she knows that the only way to become solid again is to take the edge away with a crass joke.

“And here I thought you wanted to try ana–”

“You know,” Angela cuts her off, fast but gentle, “you don’t have to say every single thing that crosses your mind.”

Ashe smiles into her pillow. Angela has no idea how many of her thoughts are crowding in her head right now, smooshing together in constant agony, ready to be uttered but never given the green light. She can’t say them, maybe ever, because then Angela would know how full she is with these feelings, how deranged she truly is, how achingly she wants someone to choose her for once. No one has. Not Jesse, not Angela (although the nature of their current business is still up to debate), definitely not her parents. Well, besides Bob, of course. _Credit where credit is due._ If she said every single thing that crossed her mind, Angela would run too, and she wants to stay like this just a little more.

_Just five more minutes._

When her time is up, she can go back to pretending that she is some callous gang leader governed by her greed and her lust for power and not some besotted fool, some sad hanger-on who mistakes chemistry for love and pleasure for affection.

“How long did this one take?” Angela strokes the wings of her “Deadlock Rebels” tattoo that covers her upper back almost in its entirety. It is a little faded now, she should have it retouched, but some misplaced sense of sentiment is stopping her. 

“Quite a while,” she says. “The roses on my hips hurt more, though.”

Angela hums her agreement and flattens her palm against her spine. Her fingers could be branding irons, Ashe thinks, scorching through her faded-out inks and her muscles and her ribs and maybe her heart too. Ashe huffs into the goose feathers. That sounds like something that moody kid would say, the one full of achingly sharp feelings and so much love and nowhere to put it, who was left at a police station with thirty bucks, a pack of cigarettes and her driving licence, twenty years ago.

“You have a beautiful back,” Angela says and flattens her palm against her spine. “Well-developed _latissimi dorsi_ and _trapezii_.”

Ashe swallows around the imaginary cotton balls in her mouth and says, “I also have a well-developed _gluteus maximus_ if you’d like to inspect it, Dr Ziegler.”

“Is that the only muscle you know?” Angela asks, and she sounds amused. Ashe wishes she could see her face and confirm, but when she tries to turn back around, she is stopped by a hand against her shoulders.

“Pretty much,” she mumbles, “but I’m a diligent student.”

“Courtesy of your upbringing?” Angela pushes her knuckles into her skin, against her muscles, and Ashe hisses in satisfaction. 

“Did you snoop around in my file?”

“I read some mission reports over the years,” Angela says as she kneads her like she is some overgrown baguette dough. “I’ve never read your file. It felt...private, I suppose.”

“We can read it together sometimes,” says Ashe and Angela snorts at it. “It’s a solid bedtime story.”

“I might like that.”

“You know, a good many things came with my upbringing,” Ashe adds then between two moans as Angela works through her muscles. “A baggage, if you will. Been working overtime to shake it all off.”

“How’s that working out for you?”

She thinks about her parents not even hesitating for a single minute before they decided to disown her once she was too disgraceful for them to handle. She thinks about the boys at school she had to beat up for calling her a sinner and a dyke. She thinks about her late Grandmother telling her gently, so very gently, that she was worried about her eternal damnation, that it was never too late to turn her life around. Except she was wrong.

“Not very well.” She lets out a short laugh and arches her back. “You know, _Astrid_ , if I had any faith left in me, I would spend every day worrying about hellfire.”

“Is it only every other day now?” Angela says, and Ashe feels her weight shift above her. Then, the sensation of lips on the back of her neck hits her with full force, and a moan breaks free from her. 

“Once a week,” she says and turns her head to look at Angela hovering over her.

When their eyes meet, Angela smiles at her and then moves to ghost her fingers over the leg bands of her boxer briefs. Ashe’s thighs flex involuntarily, and Angela must take it as encouragement because she slides her thumb under the opening. 

“Okay, that’s it,” Ashe says. “Back up, I don’t want to headbutt you.”

And so she rolls back around underneath Angela to face her once again. She runs her hands from her knees to her hips; it takes so little effort to gather Angela up in her arms and pull her flush against her naked chest. She is so slight, sometimes downright gaunt with her dark circles under her eyes after all-nighter research sessions, and it makes Ashe worry for her. Now, however, Angela is flushed pink and emanates so much warmth that she could double as a beautiful hot water bottle.

Ashe cups the back of her neck, the same place where Angela kissed her too, and tugs her closer to meet her in a kiss. Silly it may be, but she hopes her lips work as a transmitter that could directly deposit all of her fragmented feelings into Angela’s mind. Then, she wouldn’t have to voice anything ever and scramble to find the perfect words when she doesn’t even have adequate ones. 

“Permission to undress?” she asks, even though Angela is only wearing her bra and underwear at this point.

“Permission granted.”

Ashe hooks her fingers under the wiring and pulls. Angela’s breasts fall out of the cups most predictably because she can’t seem to buy a piece that actually fits and Ashe doesn’t want her to change, ever. 

She is a vision.

Ashe could point out the exact placement of her beauty marks, she could follow the length of her thin and light stretch marks with the pads of her fingers, all of that with her eyes closed. Angela’s blushed skin fills the vacancy in her brain on most lonely nights but, even so, the reality hits her like the knockback of her coach gun. She has to halt her movements and stop to enjoy the sight and flash Angela a toothy grin of honest appreciation. Angela only raises a single eyebrow in response and Ashe takes it as her cue; she loops her right arm around Angela’s ribcage and opens the clasp with a practised flick of her fingers. The bra finally falls away, and Angela throws it behind her. It lands on her writing-table, on top of a stack of research papers, and her forehead lands in the crook of Ashe’s shoulder.

“Kiss me,” Angela tells her, her voice more a sigh than anything else, and Ashe has never felt more compelled to follow orders in her entire life.

She cups the side of Angela’s face in her palm and guides her up to her, notes that her flush has traversed the length of her neck and reached her cheeks, and she obeys. Angela invites her in, and Ashe thinks that compliance tastes like freedom, and, in a way, it is. It’s not a burden, not a shackle; it’s a _goddamn_ gift because she is the only one Angela Ziegler trusts to deliver.

***

She kisses the inside of Angela’s thighs, the part that is always infallibly soft but bruises so quickly, and she stifles the instinct to bite down. She doesn’t want to hurt Angela. She only wants her to fall apart and lose herself to the moment – _moments_ , plural –, and she wants to be the one to put her pieces back together. _How corny._

“Please.” 

That’s all Angela says and Ashe nods. She replaces her teeth with the flat of her tongue, Angela’s thighs with her lips. As she kisses her, precisely how she likes to be kissed, with long and deliberate strokes, never missing a beat, Ashe wonders how she could ever get bored of this, get enough of this. The very idea is incomprehensible, or, perhaps, she is just not smart enough. 

_Thank you, mother and father, for never giving me an education. God bless you._

Her own laugh makes her lose the rhythm, and Angela’s groan of discontent arrives without delay. 

“ _Meine Fotze ist eine Komikerin_ ,” Angela murmurs, then she crosses her ankles over Ashe’s back and pulls her closer, urging her on. 

“Can I join in?” Ashe says. “Or is this a solo stand-up routine?”

“Do you have to be like that?” Angela groans and cants her hips upward until she meets Ashe’s hands. 

“Would you like me any other way?” Ashe quips, and it is supposed to sound cocky and playful and not-at-all serious.

“I don’t know,” Angela admits. “You’ve never tried anything else.”

***

_“almost ten years ago”_

Astrid Not-A-Cop is panting into her neck, her breaths hit her like little puffs of steam in the stuffy supply closet, and her pulse hammers so fast against Ashe’s palm on her chest and around her four fingers too, that she is somewhat worried she might faint. She doesn’t. She only comes, again, with a soft moan – it’s almost polite –, and Ashe has to slide her free hand to her waist to hold her up before her legs buckle under her. Astrid clenches down on her with a strength that suggests that her sole intention is to break all of Ashe’s fingers. Their entire night of flirting and gazing and longing led up to this point of destruction, and now Ashe will have to retire from her sharpshooter outlaw ways at the tender age of twenty-eight. In her prime. 

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Astrid nods and lifts a hand up to push a rebellious strand of hair behind Ashe’s ear. “It was _very_ yeah.”

“This isn’t even the best angle for this,” says Ashe. “Get me on a bed, and I’ll blow your mind.”

Astrid groans at that, and Ashe swears it’s laced with mirth, and it makes her feel _very_ proud. Borderline cocky. 

“Do you want to kill me?”

“You got me. This is my signature move against Overwatch agents,” Ashe says and, even in the dusky light of the closet, she can see Astrid’s face darken a fraction. “Works every time.”

“Overachiever,” says Astrid and pats her cheek. “Now we don’t have time for you.”

“Twenty minutes was never going to be enough for both of us,” Ashe says and kisses Astrid’s jaw and then laughs into her kiss. “And I’m all good. We can catch up later.”

She expects Astrid to put her back in her place, but she only whispers, “Angela Ziegler.”

Ashe’s laughter dies in her throat, and she nearly chokes on her own saliva.

“What was that?” 

“My name,” Angela says and cups Ashe’s face with both hands, and she is so warm, so soft – _too_ warm, _too_ soft. “How else will we catch up?”

Ashe doesn’t want to tell her how insane that idea is, how brutally their private universes clash, how she is a ruin, and she would ruin Angela too if she let her. It all makes her sink inside her own brain, into that quarry pond filled with her unvoiced needs. She wants to kill the mood on her own terms.

“Coming twice in quick succession really fried your brain, didn’t it.”

“Maybe so.”

“Once I remove my hand, and we go back out there,” Ashe says, “and you look at Jesse _fucking_ McCree, and you get reminded of your duties – you’ll change your mind.”

Ashe dares her to deny it. Angela only looks at her for an intimately long moment and then nods.

***

_two months ago_

Ashe checks the security feed on her tablet and watches as Angela and Jesse leave the tunnel, the latter pulling the crate of weapons behind him with some difficulty. He stops to look at his bike – _her_ bike – that he parked by the entrance, and while she can’t make out his face in the recording, she knows he is properly annoyed. He jumps onto the seat and grips the handlebars (fondly, she assumes), and he revs the engine one last time before he removes the ignition key. He drops it in the dirt and flips Ashe the bird, then he gets off and exits the camera’s field of view. Angela looks up then, straight into the lens, and waves. Ashe only stops herself from waving back like an idiot because she can feel Amélie’s eyes following her every moment.

She cuts the connection, then looks up towards the roof, at the underside of the beams, and says, “Aren’t you going to get off? Do I have to get you a ladder?” 

“No need,” Amélie says before she descends on a metal wire and drops down in front of Ashe with a soft thud. 

“So, did that jolt your memory?”

She met “Codename: Widowmaker” at a heist gone wrong. They were only there to clear the vault of the _Banco de Dorado,_ and they had absolutely no clue Talon wanted to have the branch manager assassinated for selling information to Overwatch. Had they known, they would’ve picked another bank – despite all, Ashe was never suicidal. Spotting her was a coincidence, much like her meeting with Angela was, except she didn’t end up in a closet with Amélie. They went out for chalupas.

Later, Amélie admitted that she wanted to eliminate Ashe too because she didn’t like loose threads, but her offer to get some chalupas shocked her to her core, so much so that it short-circuited her conditioning. She almost missed her target too. Almost. 

They ate at a tiny family restaurant in Dorado, a real gem with an open veranda, yet to be explored and exploited by tourists. Ashe showed her how to hold her chalupa correctly, told her anecdotes about her best scores, and Amélie barely said a word, but she kept smirking all along. A few months later, she brought up one of Ashe’s stories as an example of terrible group dynamics. She remembered all the details.

Now, they are friends of a sort, or at least that is how Ashe thinks of her but, truthfully, she has little idea about how Amélie feels about that term and what it entails. Ashe has always been like thistle weed, clinging onto the people she likes with an iron grip, painfully loyal, even if she prefers to hide it behind a mask of mutually beneficial agreements. _Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours._

“I don’t remember that man,” Amélie says as she walks up to the office table. “I remember his face and his _ridiculous_ hat–”

“It’s hardly worse than mine,” Ashe interjects because she has a sudden urge to defend him.

“You are right. You look ridiculous too,” Amélie says and sneers at her. “Anyway. I saw his headshot in his file when Reaper made me read it.”

“Nothing new, then?”

Ashe wants to tell her that she is sorry, but before she could utter the words, Amélie says, airily, “Dr Angela Ziegler.”

Amélie moves to sit atop her desk and proceeds to swing her legs back and forth, idly, and she looks deceivingly innocent, and Ashe feels like she should be afraid, or, at the very least, worried about whatever’s next.

“She used to wear a nametag,” says Amélie then and points to her chest, “right here, and she had these unflattering scrubs too, and she always looked like she never slept. Ever.”

“That does sound about right,” Ashe agrees. “She was your doctor?”

“No, not mine.” Amélie shakes her head and says, “Oh, that’s _funny_.”

“What is?”

“She saved Gérard’s life,” Amélie says and pinches the bridge of her nose and then sighs, long and weary. “Pity that it didn’t last.”

Ashe doesn’t know what to say. She can’t even tell how Amélie is feeling right now because her face is a complete blank and her body language offers nothing. Is she heartbroken? Angry? Just plain bored?

Should she attempt to empathise? Console? Prompt Amélie to say more? Sit down next to her on top of the table, put an arm around her and squeeze?

Would that make her run? Cry? Put a knife through Ashe’s chest? It is a complete toss-up. 

She used to think that there never lived a person more messed up than Elizabeth Caledonia Ashe, less unfit for this world, then she had a run-in with Amélie who now makes her believe that she is a very well-adjusted woman in comparison. Amélie is volatility personified, a bottle of nitro in the epicentre of an earthquake. 

Ashe loves her so _fucking_ much.

“Do you want to get some chalupas?” Ashe says in the end.

“ _Empanadas_.”

***

“How do you know her?” asks Amélie, unprompted, as she breaks her empanada in two and pulls the halves apart to look at the melted, stringy cheese filling. She likes the Ecuadorian type, deep-fried and sprinkled with sugar, and Ashe thinks the combination of sweet and salty oddly fits her.

“Angela?”

Amélie only nods and then she licks her index finger, presses the tip onto the granules of sugar on her plate and then sticks it back into her mouth. Ashe watches her play with her food as she considers her question.

“Ten years ago I thought of branching out to Europe. We already owned everyone’s asses over here, so it sounded like the next logical step,” she says. 

“Fittingly megalomaniacal,” Amélie mumbles around a mouthful of cheese and onions and fried dough. 

“Anyway,” Ashe says, “Bob and I flew out to Stuttgart for this party because everyone and their mothers were going to be there. We wanted to network a bit.”

“Oh, let me guess: you networked your way straight into a woman called Angela Ziegler,” drawls Amélie and pops the rest of her empanada in her mouth.

“Okay, firstly? There was nothing straight about it,” Ashe says and grabs her cup of tea by the handle to raise it for emphasis. “Secondly? You are an incredibly shitty audience.”

Amélie grins at her then and says, “How is it my fault that all of your anecdotes end either with you fucking a man over or fucking a woman?”

“I like consistency,” Ashe says. “And it wasn’t like that.”

Amélie watches her as she takes a sip of her tea, patiently waiting for her to swallow her mouthful and put the mug back on the table before she drops her bomb:

“You love her?”

Ashe chokes anyway and takes the napkin Amélie offers. She looks so smug.

“Don’t be stupid, I met her once,” Ashe says, and it feels like a lie. “She’s just fucking excellent in bed.”

“As opposed to everyone else you’ve ever–”

“Okay, that’s it,” Ashe says. “You had your fun. Why don’t we talk about you for a change?”

“Because your life is funnier.” Amélie shrugs. “If we want to get depressed tonight, you’ll need to buy me tequila.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next up: Amélie


	3. Amélie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Amélie has been half-asleep for years. She wants to wake up. Ashe is right there, banging a cymbal as loud as she can.
> 
> OR: Amélie is confused about her feelings, her lack of feelings and the nature of them (or the nature of their absence?)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: drug talk, alcoholism and everything that comes with Amélie being a brainwashed, severely traumatised person (such as not being the most logical and rational about her experiences)  
> lots of italics = memory flashback, yeehaw.
> 
> Thank you again for your comments and kudos, cheers!

_two months ago_

Ashe ends up buying her six shots of Herradura, the aged type with a copper colour and a taste that Amélie would liken to vanilla. Now the glasses of tequila wait in a neat row on the bar for Amélie to slowly sip through each, letting the liquor sit on her tongue and burn her taste buds, near-reminiscent of some real human emotion she can’t recall anymore. She could down them, of course, as uncultured Americans would do but it would be a waste. Herradura is meant to be enjoyed, appreciated, without a sense of rush. Getting drunk fast shouldn’t be the goal – it is about the _experience_.

At least, that’s what she tells herself. She has a vague sense of a woman who used to be very particular about the finer things in life. It might have been her. Truthfully, she doesn’t know if she can still get drunk, now that her heart only pumps with the general enthusiasm of a retail worker five minutes before closing time, and her veins carry her blood so sluggishly she might just one day die of multiple thromboses. She doesn’t want to tell Ashe any of this because she is the only person in her life who doesn’t see a freak or a weapon when she looks at her. It is already enough that she’s aware of the memory loss, the drugs, the _conditioning_. Ashe even knows that she mostly follows orders without second-guessing them. That, one day, Amélie might have to kill Ashe too, and she isn’t sure she could say no to that either. Such is her design.

“I went to his grave,” Amélie says between two sips. “Last winter. During the holidays. I went to Gérard’s grave.”

Ashe looks at her as she always does: like she is some cornered wild animal in a cage, ready to snap at her neck the moment she gets too close. She is wrong; Amélie gets no satisfaction out of casual violence. She needs a kill order to get her going. Her pulse speeds up the moment her bullet enters a skull, her heart thumps fast and hard against her ribs, her lungs fill with fresh air, and she is _reborn_. For a minute or two, while she is taking her first breaths, her brain swims in serotonin and dopamine, and she remembers herself, as she once was – Amélie Guillard, Amélie Lacroix, just _Amélie._ Someone with a functioning mind and soul, who felt passion for the right things: men, women, art, life in its fullness. All of the joy, all of the devastating sadness. Now, her only passion is that surge of hormones and, maybe, Mexican food.

If only it weren’t so enragingly futile. Amélie is ephemeral, and she dies faster than a mayfly, mere hours after every successful hit. When she goes back to the headquarters and subjects herself to her drugs, she forgets Amélie and welcomes Widowmaker back. It takes a lot of mental energy to deny that pull; it is perhaps the most unshakable of all her conditioning. Yet, Elizabeth Caledonia Ashe knows how to free her from it. With food and alcohol and being too stubborn or too stupid to give up on her. 

“Are you okay?” Ashe asks her and Amélie has no answer to that.

“I don’t remember much of it,” Amélie says instead. “Killing him, I mean. I wasn’t quite myself.”

“And now?”

“Now, it’s like,” she says then stops to gather her jumbled thoughts, “I’m suffering from sleep paralysis.”

Ashe grabs the salt and shakes some of it straight into her open mouth before she throws back her shot of tequila, swift and careless, and she doesn’t bother with the lemon wedges. A single drop of copper falls from her lips onto the collar of her white shirt, and it seeps into the fabric, leaving a wet patch behind.

“You’re going to be cryptic, aren’t you,” Ashe says, and Amélie finds herself nodding.

Ashe came to her life like a meteor, blazing through her atmosphere, bright and impossible to miss. She landed with an explosion so intense that it roused Amélie from her sleep, and she is still here, shaking her shoulders with relentless determination. 

_Wake up, Amélie. You’re late for therapy. It’s time to conceptualise the vacuous space inside you._

“Imagine that you are a puppet on a string,” says Amélie and finishes her tequila. “It’s your hand holding the gun, you’re the one aiming, but you don’t get to decide if you want to pull the trigger. You can’t do a whole lot about it, but it doesn’t even matter because you are only dreaming.”

“But you’re awake now?”

“I think I might be waking up,” says Amélie and sighs. “But I’m still not in control. I have a demon sitting on my chest like”–she sees a sudden flash of a picture in the back of her mind, a bright woman against the darkness, the eyes of an imp piercing into the spectator, almost accusingly–“ _The Nightmare_ by Henry Fuseli. In a way, that’s worse.”

What’s even worse is that she can’t be sure that the killer inside her is not the very same woman who married Gérard Lacroix or the prima ballerina who was the perfect Princess Odette or the little girl who was terrified of spiders. Perhaps she has always been like this – she just never realised it.

Ashe types something into her phone and then slides it towards Amélie. On the screen, there is _The Nightmare_. She takes her last glass of tequila and swallows it down in one go.

“I’ve told you before that _this_ helps,” says Amélie and gestures at their empty shot glasses, at the bar they are elbowing on and then at the lines of tequila bottles on the shelves behind it. 

“Getting fucked up in a dive bar?”

“Doing normal things,” she corrects her. “I think I retain more of myself nowadays.”

“Maybe you developed a tolerance to the smack,” Ashe says. “It’s like painkillers. You need to mix things up to make it last, and you’ve been shooting the same shit for ages now.”

Amélie has to smile at that. Ashe tends to act like she only has a casual drug habit, and it oddly makes her more comfortable about her condition. Ashe allows her to pretend for a few hours that she isn’t a neurologically enhanced supersoldier hooked on horse tranquillisers, just some girl who should be in a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. A pretty regular case in Ashe’s circles.

“That must be it,” Amélie says and grins at Ashe. “I remember more every day and... _c'est vraiment horrible.”_

“I know it feels like one step forward, two steps back,” Ashe says and scoops a fistful of salted cashews out of the bowl in front of her. 

“More like two steps forward, one step back,” Amélie says and takes some of Ashe’s cashews from her palm. “There’s _some_ progress. I only thought it would make me feel better.”

“It makes you feel worse?”

“It doesn’t make me feel much either way,” she lies, and Ashe opens her mouth as if she wants to say something, but then she closes it. “I get these snippets: smells, noises, a _nametag_. I replay them over and over, but there’s no feedback.”

“But that’s not true,” Ashe says. “When you saw Angela – Dr Ziegler – you felt something, didn’t you?”

It’s true. Amélie felt _something_ , and she recognised it as pain. Fear. Helplessness. Like a cut-up, melted old film, missing way too many frames to tell the whole story, her memories bombarded her brain: the sound of a siren, the smell of gun powder and ash and blood, shrill screaming, tears rolling down her cheeks, their supply seemingly unending, Dr Ziegler hooking Gérard up to the IV in the ambulance. They let Amélie ride with them because she promised to shut up and not get in the way. Complete lack of control. She needs to regain some of it, so she deflects.

“No, _you_ felt something,” Amélie says. “She’s your Doxa Girl, isn’t she?”

Ashe looks pained for a moment and then downright annoyed with her eye-rolling and her furrowed brows. She has always been so open, so obvious with her body language. Amélie sometimes thinks she is doing it on purpose, for her benefit.

“Yeah, she is the _Doxa Girl_ ,” says Ashe, crossing her arms over her chest. “But we were talking about you, _Amélie_.”

_I like how she says my name._

It is such a simple realisation, but it hits her nonetheless. She likes how Ashe tries so hard to get it right, how she went from nearly calling her an “Emily” to something almost perfect. She likes having preferences now, about empanadas, about tequila, about the company she keeps. The demon on her chest is withering away now, she knows this, losing weight and power with every passing day, and it is getting easier to breathe. 

“I’d like to sleep at your place tonight,” Amélie blurts out and reaches over to play with the salt shaker. She must seem so needy, so weak.

Ashe doesn’t even hesitate before she says, “All right. Let’s go.”

“I’ll pick up the tab,” Amélie says. She wants to add “thank you for being here for me” or “I care about you, Ashe” but she cannot because either or both could be a lie. Maybe Ashe is a fluke, only here to mess with her brain. The other possibility is even worse: all these pitiful, off-brand feelings could be a figment of her imagination, made up by herself or by Talon, some last semblance of humanity, implanted in her brain to keep her from going completely insane. Despite that dread, despite the lead in her stomach pulling her down, she wants to be with Ashe, she wants the solid pressure of her body, she wants the enveloping warmth.

“That was a real subtle change of the subject there, by the way,” Ashe drawls when they are standing outside in the light spring rain. It pitter-patters on Ashe’s cowboy hat, now perching on Amélie’s head because she was offered it and she couldn’t find an excuse to turn it down.

“I didn’t change the subject.” Amélie’s words come out on their own volition; she can’t stop them from bubbling past her lips. “You want me to feel things. So make me.”

***

Amélie loves the night. Everything is dark and desaturated, all the reds, the oranges, the yellows are greys and blues in the moonlight. Sprawled out on Ashe’s bed, wearing only a crop top and some boxer briefs she borrowed, surrounded by whites and greys and blues, her exposed skin looks almost ordinary, like she is but a single stroke on an oil painting, blending in. Ashe is lying on her side, propped up on her elbow, her hand disappearing into her wild tresses, and she is looking at Amélie with a smile on her face that she can’t place, can’t read. It might be kindness or fondness or something else, and Amélie isn’t any ready to chase that truth. There’s a chance – minuscule it may be – that it’s _love_. It would be the exact sort of unreasonable, absurd thing Ashe might do, with her ridiculous loyalty and her golden heart, still beating warmly deep underneath the rubble of her past. Amélie wants to nip it in the bud before it could bloom and thread its vines all over her life and get tighter and tighter and tighter. It needs to be simpler than that. 

“Do you want to fuck me?” she whispers. 

Sex doesn’t have to be complicated, she thinks. She can do that for her. She can lean into Ashe’s pull, and she can give _something_ back after all these months of only taking.

_Go ahead, get me out of your system. S'il te plait, mon ami._

Ashe only looks shocked for a second or two, then her smile returns as she says, “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you don’t want me,” says Ashe and slides her hand across the bedsheets to touch Amélie’s forearm.

It’s not true, not exactly. In a way, her body is more awake than her mind, and she isn’t ignorant of its desires. Ashe has a magnetism Amélie has trouble fighting off; she is personable and charismatic in a comfortable, casual way that puts Amélie at ease and, of course, she is _gorgeous_. Amélie Guillard would not hesitate to call her up to a private meeting in her dressing room at _l’Opéra national de Paris_ after a show, and she wouldn’t think twice about sinking to her knees to service her. The idea and the accompanying mental image slaps Amélie across the face, and if she could, she would blush, she thinks. Maybe that isn’t a fantasy. She might have done that once. She doesn’t remember, and it doesn’t matter either because she isn’t Amélie Guillard anymore, she definitely isn’t Amélie Lacroix, and she isn’t even Widowmaker. She is the interregnum between two queens, the cold vacuum of space, a hungry black hole. Should Ashe offer everything to her, she would find herself devouring it all. She would eat all of Ashe’s love and her devotion and her selflessness too, and she doesn’t know if anything would escape her gravity in return. Sex is much better, much cleaner.

“I love you, you know,” Ashe says then, quiet but steady. “I love you a great deal.”

“I know,” replies Amélie, and it is true. Terrifyingly so.

“Do you? Really?” 

She only nods in response and Ashe curls her fingers around her arm, and her skin is so hot it could light her up, a solar flare or a forest fire licking at her, and Amélie is spiralling. She can’t stop her sigh and she can’t stop her moan and she can’t even rein in her thoughts barreling through her brain telling her how starved she must be for this simple, human contact if she falls apart at first touch.

“I want you to be happy,” Ashe says, “and I don’t think sleeping with me would make you happy.”

“It might,” Amélie says. “I don’t know what _would_.”

“Do you want to…” Ashe trails off and searches her face for a moment, and then she says, “I could spoon you.”

The offer surprises her, and it must be apparent too because Ashe quickly adds, “Or you could spoon me? If that’s your thing?”

Her _thing_ , as it turns out, is Ashe lying on her side with her entire back pressed against Amélie’s front, her chest slowly rising and falling with each even breath, and Amélie’s arm looping around her belly, pulling her closer than it should be possible. Amélie knows she _clings,_ but Ashe either doesn’t mind, or it doesn’t bother her enough to keep her from sleeping. Her body is like a furnace, and her heat radiates straight through Amélie, making her blood boil. It thrums in her ears, pulses in the veins of her wrists, and she knows she won’t sleep a lick. How could she? She is too alive. 

Before she could get caught up in that line of thought, Ashe disentangles herself from her, and, for a moment, Amélie thinks about allowing herself a sob. She has no time for it, however, because Ashe turns around to face her, still asleep or so she assumes, and she pulls Amélie into her chest. Then, Amélie finally lets out that sob, and amidst the delirium of it, she thinks that Ashe was right all along, and this is happiness now, the one version of it she can afford.

“You’re fine, darling,” Ashe whispers into the dark, and she is right about that too.

Amélie runs on instinct when she presses their foreheads together, and Ashe lets her. She doesn’t flinch away, even though she must be freezing, she thinks, like a flagpole in the winter or–

“Sweet Jesus, you’re like a bag of frozen peas,” Ashe says, and she sounds amused. “Remind me to put you over my knees the next time I bust them.”

“That’s easily the worst selection and order of words you’ve ever said to me.”

“Is that so?” Ashe tilts her head back and lays a kiss onto her hairline. “I should talk more, then.”

***

_three days ago_

She watches as Ashe plays with the coffeemaker she bought a month ago. She drove to Annecy to get something with enough buttons to double as a jukebox after Ashe cruelly forced her to listen to her whining session about their apparent lack of proper kitchen appliances and how it was ruining Ashe’s entire life. Amélie is not huge on coffee anymore; like alcohol, it doesn’t move much in her, and she doesn’t like the taste enough to drink it out of a sense of nostalgia. Still, she indulged her anyway because it makes Ashe happy and, in a way, the noises of the coffee grinder and the smell of roasted beans make the château feel more like a real home where real people live and not merely a glorified safe house. The drink is growing on her too.

“I told Angela about you,” Ashe announces into her fresh cup of coffee that must be darker than deep space (she knows this already, she needn’t check), and then sneaks a glance at Amélie.

“You told her you have friends?” Amélie says as she pours honey onto her toast with a dipper, watching the stream with some fascination, as it pools and spreads slowly down the sides and onto the plate. “Did she congratulate you?”

“You are fucking hilarious before your morning coffee,” says Ashe and places a steaming mug in front of Amélie: black coffee, hundred per cent arabica because that’s the only thing Amélie’s willing to consume, with three cubes of brown cane sugar. Ashe would sooner drink motor oil.

“I specifically told her about _you_ ,” Ashe continues, and Amélie wishes she wouldn’t. “That I know you. That we are friends, or so I hope.”

Amélie drops the honey dipper back in the jar, and with that, her stomach drops too, so she presses both palms against the sides of her mug until the heat is too much to take. 

“Or so you hope,” she repeats, airy and weak and she hates how her voice sounds to her. Her rage hasn’t reached her brain yet; it is still scaling her spine, fast and unrelenting, and as infuriating as it is now to be at the total mercy of her own feelings, it is a welcome change. She will fall asleep sooner or later, anyway.

“Yeah, well,” Ashe says. “The way you are staring me down right now is giving me the shivers, darling. ”

_“Amélie, love, you are shivering,” Gérard says and pulls her under the covers and into his arms._

_“I feel strange...I think I have a fever.”_

_It’s her own voice, Amélie realises, airy and weak and she hates_ –

She comes to with the smallest gasp, and she doesn’t know if Ashe notices it because her eyes are trained firmly on the inside of her cup.

“Why would you do that?” She tries to keep her simmering anger at bay, but her voice wobbles anyway, and something scratches at the back of her throat, akin to a sudden spike of fear. “We discussed this. _Multiple times_. I’m not ready to–”

_“I’m not ready,” Amélie says._

_“Hm?” Gérard murmurs and turns over to face her. Ever so attentive, even when roused from the deepest of sleep. What a beautiful fool. “What do you mean, love?”_

_“I’m not ready,” she repeats. “But it doesn’t matter.”_

_She crawls atop her husband, her knees bracketing his hips, and she says, “I won’t ever be ready, will I?”_

_“Amélie...you have a fever,” Gérard says and tries to peel her off his body, but she steels her muscles._

_“I love you,” Amélie says when she puts her fingers around his throat._

“Amélie, she has an entire ring binder full of shit about you,” Ashe says and sips her coffee, her gaze now fixed on Amélie’s shaking hands. “Her therapist thinks she is obsessed with you. I didn’t bring you up – _she did_. She thought it would be fair to talk about her baggage.”

“I’m her baggage?” 

“No, she has a very diverse baggage portfolio,” Ashe says and drops her cup in the sink where it lands with an abhorrent clang. “Like we all do. And Amélie Lacroix is a part of it.”

“Oh, welcome to the neighbourhood,” she says and downs her coffee. “I should send her a greeting card that says ‘My condolences.’”

“You’re really on fire this morning, lo–” 

Ashe snaps her mouth shut. 

It’s a small mistake, and Amélie can’t fault her for it. It isn’t even in french and yet, Amélie takes the plunge.

_“You look gorgeous,” Gérard says, his head peeking into the room, his fingers curling over the doorframe. The maid must’ve left the door ajar._

_“Gérard, please!”_

_“Oh, come on, love,” he says. “Let me have a look. You could never bring bad luck.”_

_“I asked you to do one thing–”_

_“–that I don’t look at your dress before tomorrow, I know,” he drawls. “I couldn’t help myself.”_

_“You know, I could strangle you.”_

Amélie wants to break something, she realises, either her cup or the jar of honey, smash them right against the kitchen tiles. She is slipping into a very ugly and deep sinkhole – she has been doing that for the better part of the morning–, and she needs a rush of blood to her head to snap her out of it. There’s a traitorous part of her that wanted Ashe to continue, to let that word fall, to reclaim it from Gérard, to turn it into something easy and loving again instead of a one-way ticket to her least favourite memories. She truly is the worst widow of them all. It was not enough to kill him, no, she wants to destroy him too, all that is left of him: the memory of the man he once was. Replace him with someone new, someone real, someone who will love her despite everything, until nothing remains of Gérard Lacroix and Amélie’s fingers crushing in his windpipe.

“I think you should meet her,” Ashe says. “When you are ready. I think it would be good for you.”

Amélie can manage little else than a nod as she puts her cup back on the table with shaking hands.


	4. Angela, again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Angela has a much-needed conversation with Ashe after Dr Singh peaks as a therapist.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this sure took forever. I no longer remember how to write.  
> Fun fact: I cross-reference my own fics.  
> Oh, I guess I should say that there's some not particularly graphic strap-on sex in this one. For character development reasons.  
> If it isn't your thing you can just skip the last section.
> 
> Happy New Year!

_Today_

_July 10th_

“This time next week?”

“I’m afraid I can’t,” Angela says. “I’m leaving for a conference in Geneva on Wednesday.”

Elizabeth – _no_. 

She stops herself.

The name comes too quickly to her, as though she has said it a thousand times before, and perhaps she has, somewhere in the depths of her mind. Certainly not out loud. That would be dangerously familiar territory, almost sentimental, and she really can’t go there just yet. She is already starting to feel lonely in her own bed, blindly patting the bedsheets, searching for a solid form in the dead of night, a patch of warmth, anything. That won’t do, not when everything is still so malleable and amorphous. Not when they just flicker in and out of each other’s lives like the spark of an old lighter, trying to reignite a lost flame. Angela needs clarity. She needs to crystallise.

 _Ashe_ , not Elizabeth, had called her before she arrived at her therapist’s office; it was a five-minute phone call from the Annecy–Haute-Savoie–Mont Blanc Airport right before she boarded her plane to London. That’s all it took for Angela to reschedule her entire next week because Ashe said those five words, the ones she wanted to hear so desperately: _Amélie wants to meet you._

Dr Singh looks expectantly at her and says nothing, so Angela adds, “I can do Monday or Tuesday if any of that works for you.”

“Let’s do Monday then.” Dr Singh pencils her in her calendar – _how traditional_ , Angela thinks – and doesn’t make a comment about Angela acting like she is doing her a favour when it’s the other way around. “Before you leave – have you tried any of the exercises I suggested?”

Angela tried. That much is true. She tried most of them and failed all of them, and she knows she would feel better about her efforts if she applied any. There was no real trial and error, only a flimsy attempt, much like someone dipping a toe into a freezing lake and pulling it back immediately and then packing up their entire life to move to the Dominican Republic. Lately, she’s been pouring most of her waking hours into genetic engineering, and the rest into Ashe and their _business_ that she’s yet to name. A necessary distraction, a coping mechanism, Dr Singh would call it. Angela goes for “my friend” when she talks to her colleagues and “Caledonia” when she phones Reinhardt or Torbjörn to give them their weekly update on her life (Dr Singh’s orders). When she forgets herself, then comes “Elizabeth” and something else too, something that terrifies her if she allows herself to think too much about it.

“Well, I filled out your self-compassion questionnaire,” she says and then slides her glass off the coaster and onto the table. “ _Mostly_ filled it out.”

Dr Singh looks at her, then at the glass, then back at her, and her face is neutral as ever, and Angela is almost upset by it.

She chooses to add, “By the end of it, I felt even less compassion for myself than I did before.”

“Then you went about it the wrong way,” Dr Singh says and reaches over to put Angela’s glass back to its designated place. “Give it another go. You may surprise yourself.”

“The inner workings of one Angela Ziegler” is the only field where Angela can’t apply herself enough, where she can’t be the top student, the best researcher, the employee of the month, the _prodigy_. It is how it has always been, and she changes her habits with the speed and success rate of a sloth trying to cross the interstate. 

She nods anyway, even as her fingernails dig welts into her life line.

***

_almost ten years ago_

“ _Pourquoi es-tu ici?_ ” comes Amélie’s voice as she swings the door to her dressing room open. “ _Je pensais_ – oh.”

Angela finds herself assaulted by the image of a red-in-the-face Amélie Lacroix, caught in the middle of undressing, her pointe shoes already gone and her skirt thrown over her chair, the shoulder straps of her leotard crawling lower and lower with each breath, a sheen of post-performance afterglow still on her skin reflecting the strong lights above her mirror. _Flagrante delicto,_ Angela thinks despite herself and the very thought tightens her throat. She almost drops the small cactus nestled in her palms, and for a moment, she wants to do just that. She wants the pot to shatter against the wooden floor, its chips to fly in all direction, the soil to spill, the roots to upturn. Anything to slap her awake.

“You were expecting Gérard, I assume,” Angela says eventually. Her cheeks must match the tint of Amélie’s blush, and she knows that on any other day, it would be noted. Amélie would tease her, mercilessly, all in good humour, but today she chose grace or, perhaps, she has simply grown weary and tired of pretending.

“Not really, no,” says Amélie and steps aside. “Only hoping. No offence, _chérie_.”

“None taken,” Angela says. “I can hardly compete with your husband.”

Amélie laughs at that, and it sounds choked before it shifts into a strained cough.

“And you needn’t anyway,” she says. “He had to fly to Germany to smooth out some mess Jesse made. Hence the flowers.”

Amélie spins around slowly as she gestures all over her dressing room filled with bouquets of white lilies, some of them almost pouring out of their vases.

“In that case, I might owe you an apology,” Angela says when she hands over the cactus. She knows it doesn’t measure up; if Amélie’s heart were a scale, it would find it too light in comparison, too drab, lacking impact and flourish. Still, there’s something poetic about the contrast, about how resilient it looks next to some cut lilies that are already sagging and wilting. It is an ugly, unfair thought, entitled too, so she crushes it before it could bud and bloom. “I’ve just flown in from Stuttgart and–”

“Don’t tell me that you are the agent who abandoned the mission to get _fucked_ in some closet,” Amélie says. Her words are so unexpectedly crude that Angela’s eyes flash to her cactus – now safely perched on a table – to see if it would wobble and topple over from the sheer power of a curse word with a french accent. “I heard it all from Gérard. I can’t believe–”

Amélie snaps her mouth shut and her signature grin, the one reserved only for torturing Angela never comes. She substitutes it with a frown, and Angela wants to shrink away.

“I must say I’m surprised you figured things out with McCree,” Amélie adds and slams the door closed behind them. It is suddenly “McCree” and no longer “Jesse”, and Angela can’t tell if it’s the noise making her shiver and wince or the mortifying realisation that Amélie has no concept of who she is or what she wants. In a way, she should be thankful. “I’ve never thought I’d live to see the day.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Angela says, and she feels like an elementary school student trying to explain away a failing grade. “It wasn’t Jesse.”

“But it was _you_.”

“It was me,” Angela admits, and she feels almost guilty about it, at least until she remembers the sensation of lips kissing along the length of her jawline and fingers circling her breasts.

“Who is he, then?” Amélie says and walks up to her mirror. She pulls a wet wipe out of its container and starts removing her stage makeup – Princess Odette melts away, and Amélie emerges, and Angela is stuck staring at her profile like the world’s most awkward voyeur. “Another agent? Overwatch? Blackwatch?”

“Her name is Ashe,” she says, and a part of her feels some foul satisfaction over Amélie’s hand freezing in midair and trembling for a split second before it moves on to grab another wipe. “I believe she separates people from their assets. Professionally.”

Amélie finally laughs, and Angela’s satisfaction turns sweeter as she says, “I hope she robbed you of your life too.”

“ _La petite mort?_ ” Angela quips and her blush returns to her neck and her face. “She killed me twice.”

“I am glad,” Amélie says after a pregnant pause and Angela doesn’t want to believe her. “You deserve that, more than anyone, I suppose”–Angela’s fists clench on their own volition–“Now, I can forgive you for ruining my premier night. It was for the greater good, was it not?”

“How exactly did I ruin your premier?” Angela says. “You were _fantastic_.”

“Of course I was.” Amélie balls up her towelettes and throws them across the room, past Angela and straight into her garbage can. “And I wanted to celebrate my success with Gérard. As we always do.”

Angela’s mouth opens and closes. Her tongue swirls around her words and trips over nothing. Amélie looks over at her, and the mask of severity slips off her face as she says, “Would you have dinner with me? I heard there’s a new place that offers excellent chalupas.”

“I haven’t eaten yet.”

“Then it’s a date,” Amélie says and peels her leotard off. “I love the cactus, by the way.”

***

_Today_

_July 10th_

“I gave you a key,” Angela says when she spots Ashe leaning against her front door with her arms crossed over her chest, and she thinks she looks like the henchman of some old-timey movie villain with her studded leather jacket and her beanie. Her sleeves are rolled up, and Angela’s gaze travels her forearm, over the roses and the thorns and the skull to the Doxa hugging her wrist. Ashe’s idea of a civilian disguise. Apparently, she thinks that adult humans have no sense of object permanence; if she drops her cowboy hat, she is suddenly not Calamity Ashe, a professional outlaw with fifty-three international arrest warrants. How she dodges facial recognition is beyond Angela, making her wonder just who or what is behind Ashe and her organisation. “You can use it, you know. All you need to do is to put it in the keyhole and twist–”

“Hey, Astrid.” Ashe pushes herself away from the door and greets her with a one-armed hug, and all Angela can think is that she would prefer a real one, something that puts pressure on her body, but beggars can’t be choosers. “Been a while.”

“It’s been precisely a week,” she says.

“Maybe I missed you,” Ashe says but lets go of her anyway. Her warmth, ripped away, leaves a stingingly cold vacuum, and Angela has to ignore the urge to mirror Ashe’s words. “Is that too corny? Am I not allowed to say corny shit now?”

“It’s not like I can stop you.” Angela opens the door and steps inside, and she looks back at Ashe, expecting her to follow, but she is busy kicking off her boots on the “Willkommen” mat. “Did Bob pick you up at the airport?”

“Yeah. He wanted to say ‘hi’, but he had to get to IKEA before closing time,” Ashe supplies. “He is picking up fake plants and stuff like that.”

Angela lets that sink in as she hangs her keys on a hook and throws her backpack on her couch without looking. Then comes a clang instead of a thud, and she doesn’t need to check to know that the floor ended up its final destination.

“You got an apartment?” She says. “Here?” 

“Well, I mean...” Ashe shrugs and drops herself down on one of the stools by the kitchen island. “There’s some ongoing business tying me to this side of the pond.”

“Hotels are expensive, and you don’t know how to use my front door key,” Angela finishes for her. “Understandable. A sound financial decision.”

Ashe looks pained when she says, “Are you mad at me?”

“I’m not,” Angela says, too quickly perhaps. “I’m just– Why do you wear it?”

“Huh?” Ashe says as dumbly as she could manage, Angela thinks, but she slides her left hand off the counter and out of Angela’s field of view.

“Your wristwatch,” Angela says. “It’s stopped. Why do you wear it still?”

“You know why.”

“Nostalgia?”

“That too.”

“What else?”

“Ange, you are forcing my hand,” Ashe says and puts both of her hands on the kitchen island, palms up. Angela wants to reach over, but she stops herself because she knows all-too-well that Ashe would entangle their fingers, and all of this new-found, stubborn force driving her forward would dissipate. Angela would mellow out, go back straight into her non-confrontational, avoidant self who has so much to say but never does, back to her old routine, back to Dr Singh telling her that she is self-defeating and resistant to change. “I can’t say I like it.”

“I’m not,” Angela says and it feels like a lie. “I just want you to say what you think. You never do.”

_Dr Singh would call that one “projection”._

“You want me to say things you don’t want to hear.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I think I do.” Ashe sighs and plays with the clasp of her Doxa. “I think you want an excuse. Well, you don’t need one, I can just–”

Angela feels like she is in a speeding car, her legs are dangling off the driver’s seat, but she can’t reach the brakes.

“Leave? Do you think I’d give you my key if I wanted to get rid of you?”

“I don’t know, darling,” Ashe says, quiet and serious, and she has an odd look about her that makes Angela skip a breath. “Your mind is a mystery to me.”

Ashe’s fingers curl up, and her nails whiten as they press into the marble top of the kitchen island, and Angela wonders if it’s still not too late to backtrack and handwave it away and fall into bed as their routine dictates.

“Dr Singh thinks my progress has been sluggish lately,” Angela says, “and that I need to get my relationships in order first before I can tackle my own issues.”

“Whatever you need to do,” Ashe says, “you should do. I can’t promise I won’t be upset, but I can promise I’ll accept and respect it.”

“El – _Ashe,_ ” she says, and she sees Ashe’s lower lip trembling before she sucks it into her mouth and bites down on it. “I can’t make a decision either way because I have no idea what we are doing. What we _have been_ doing for the past two months.”

 _For the past ten years,_ she thinks but doesn’t add it.

“This is exactly what you want it to be,” Ashe says.

“So it’s fine by you either way?” Angela says, and she can feel her pulse quicken and drum against her inner ear. “What a privilege it must be to be you, Ashe.”

“I’m not blasé.” Ashe stands up and lingers by the kitchen island, her jaw clenched and her brows drawn together so tightly it nearly looks like a single line of quiet rage. “I have _preferences_. I just don’t prioritise them over you.”

“Do you want me?” Angela cuts her off because she can’t handle her noble _bullshit_ , her annoying selflessness, the mere audacity to reflect all of Angela’s terrible complexes right back at her.

“I do.”

“How do you want me?”

“Ange–”

“How do you want me?” Angela repeats. “Do you want my body? Do you want me to ride you? Do you want my mouth? Surely not my fingers, I know so much.”

“Why are you like this?” 

If anything could stop this car from flying off a cliff, it would be Ashe’s bloodless, pleading face, wordlessly begging her to stop but it’s not enough. This conversation is a traffic accident waiting to happen and she can’t look away.

“Because you are so sweet on me,” Angela says, and she is acutely aware how her voice vibrates and teeters on the edge of a sob. “You have always been so very, _very_ – and then you just don’t do a thing about it.”

She thinks about herself ten years ago, panting for breath as all her muscles in her body tightened and spasmed at the same time, or so she thought, gasping out an almost desperate cry, hoping that a gorgeous stranger would save her from her hopeless desires for a married woman and her complete inability to do anything about them. 

“I told you my name, and you did nothing with it. I gave you my key and–”

“And I’m here,” Ashe whispers.

“Well, good. Because I want you to be here,” Angela gasps the words out before she could swallow them and pretend her feelings never existed in the first place. “Because I like you a lot. Oh, fantastic, now I sound like some schoolgirl. I like you – _ridiculous_.”

Ashe looks lost for words. Her face is chalk white, drained of all colour, and she has the general demeanour of someone who has just seen the ghost of a sickly Victorian child patrolling the grand foyer at three o’clock in the morning. Angela wants to take it all back and strike up a conversation about some neutral topic, maybe about Bob’s plastic plants or cutting edge neurosurgery techniques. Dr Singh’s disapproving stare swims into her mind’s eye to ban her from that course of action effective immediately.

“I’m not going to say that I’m in love with you because I don’t know that,” she says, quashing the urge to cry. “I haven’t had to consider these things in a decade. Who’s to know?”

“I like you too,” Ashe says and crosses the kitchen. “And I’m beyond rusty, too. I don’t think I’ve ever been _not_ rusty.”

“I would rather not compare our romantic histories because I don’t want to feel worse about myself than I already do.”

Ashe huffs out a short laugh at that and Angela is pulled into a hug, a real one, _finally_ , and she wants to dissolve like a drop of paint in water, losing shape and form and giving herself over to the current.

“What on earth did your therapist do to you?” Ashe whispers into the side of her face.

“She got into my head,” Angela says. “Which is technically her job so I can’t exactly complain.”

“I’m glad, I think,” Ashe says. “I never would’ve said a thing otherwise.”

Angela doesn’t know if she wants to cry or laugh at that, so she only lays a kiss on Ashe’s neck and hopes it conveys at least five per cent of the maelstrom of emotion swirling through her, and as Ashe tightens her hold, she thinks it might just do the job.

***

The couch is hardly the best place for any of this, Angela thinks as her knees sink between two cushions. She would love to blame her unease on the questionable quality of her second-hand, upcycled IKEA furniture, but, truthfully, aside from a brief encounter in a supply closet, she has always chosen comfort over excitement and simple pleasures over spontaneity.

“I don’t think I want to have sex with you like this,” Ashe says and rolls her hips up for emphasis, and Angela has to smother her moan with her palm. “Not after today.”

“Ashe, I’m _so_ sorry,” Angela says and grabs Ashe’s wrists to guide her hands along her spread legs and up to her waist. “I really shouldn’t have said what I said. It was uncalled for, and it is none of my business how–”

“It’s not that,” says Ashe and grips Angela’s hips to pull her down, slow and gentle, and Angela feels herself clench so hard that, for a delirious moment, she thinks they would need to stop and take a breather. She is wrong. “I meant that I don’t want to have all this”–Ashe rather politely stops to allow Angela the moan she has been repressing–“meaningless sex when it is clearly not meaningless to me.”

“It’s not,” Angela manages, “it’s not meaningless to me either.”

“But it’s going to be if I don’t shut my mouth?” Ashe teases as she spreads her fingers out on the back of Angela’s back.

“Oh, you catch on fast.”

“Go on a date with me,” Ashe says and presses back into Angela, and she wonders how she could do anything but nod when she is speeding towards a swift climax under the hands of someone who knows what makes her tick embarrassingly well. “A real one. Not whatever this is.”

“Ashe…”

“I don’t have to be Ashe, you know,” she whispers, and she doesn’t miss a single beat. Her hips cant in perfect rhythm, she doesn’t rush, she doesn’t falter, she is the very pillar of reliability and patience, and Angela could kiss her for that. “I know it worries you. I can be anything and anyone, trust me.”

Ashe reaches down to touch her, and it only takes a few short minutes for Angela to collapse on top of her, her cheek flat against her sternum, her fingers grasping at her arms.

 _I don’t want you to be anyone else_ , she wants to say, but she comes too fast and too hard, and everything else gets trapped in her heaving chest.

“Be my date to the conference in Geneva,” Angela says as she listens to Ashe’s rapid heartbeat. “There’s a party. White tie. I still have time to RSVP.”

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s not a casino,” Ashe says, “but I’m sure hotels have supply closets too.”


	5. Ashe, again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ashe and Angela try this whole dating thing, and Amélie has opinions about that. Not that she's capable of expressing herself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey!  
> So this isn't an ideal time to update for obvious reasons, but if you want to be distracted from the current abysmal state of the world for 15 minutes, let's have at it.  
> As usual, comments are appreciated.  
> Thank you!

_Today_

_July 16th_

_(Wednesday)_

“I’ll come up and help with your luggage,” Ashe announces to Angela’s lightly flickering, pixelated face displayed on the centre console of her restored black Mustang. Angela seems awfully strapped for time and equally bothered by it: she is flushed and frazzled, only wearing her pyjama bottoms that look suspiciously like boxer briefs stolen and appropriated. Her thick-rimmed glasses are sliding off her nose, her hair is down, falling over her lenses, unbrushed and resembling a haystack hit by high winds. She’s yet to put on a top. In a demonstration of inhuman strength, Ashe focuses on Angela’s face and says a silent prayer of gratitude to the omnic gods (Bob’s hacker friends, really) for the excellent encryption service they provide. She would rather not have Angela’s bare chest run circles on the deep web without her explicit and enthusiastic consent.

“Thank you, but I have–”

Angela leaves the screen, and the unmistakable sounds of violent rummaging come from somewhere to the left, along with the muffled thuds of stilettos impacting with Angela’s living room rug. Ashe grins at the mental image.

“–only one bag now. I’ll be down in a minute. Or fifteen minutes.”

“Take your time, darling,” Ashe says. “I can always speed to the airport.”

Angela pops her head back into her tablet’s field of view and says, “What’s another criminal charge to you, right?”

“To _Dr Caledonia Locke_ , you mean,” Ashe says and holds up her newly acquired fake ID. It proudly introduces her to the world as a forty-year-old London resident with British-American dual citizenship, born in Albuquerque, with an “other” gender marker. She considers that one a particularly fun detail. “I’ll let you get ready.”

Ashe cuts the line and turns around. Bob is in the backseat, all huddled up, playing with a Tetris emulator and humming a tune in his vibrating, electronic voice, a song that might be from the 1970s. Their shared love for all things “retro” (especially if it’s impractically outdated and requires at least three adapters to function) was one of the first stones in the foundation of their friendship that started thirty years ago. 

It all started with the record player that her father had stacked away in their attic, a family heirloom passed down from a great-great-grandfather, that Ashe found when she was ten, hiding from the ire of her mother after yet another detention. It was a Sanyo machine manufactured in 1978 that had seen better days. Her father had never bothered to have it fixed, but neither had he thrown it out along with the boxes full of vinyl records and cassette tapes. It probably reminded him of their family’s glory days when the Ashes could first call themselves “nouveau riche” instead of “pleasantly upper middle class”. 

Bob found her there, sitting cross-legged in the soft light, surrounded by swirls of dust motes as she tried to clean a filthy, old David Bowie LP with an ever dirtier rag. Not only had Bob never told anyone of her haven (not that they bothered to look for her, most of the time), he even helped her bring the machine back to life, instructing her gently and patiently and with some healthy wariness like one would approach a feral stray cat that may or may not be rabid. He could’ve done it himself, much faster too, but Ashe supposes he wanted her to have a sense of accomplishment, for once in her life, something that wasn’t intricately tied to her worth as an heir and a _girl_. 

_A good Christian girl._

_My mother would have a field day with me now._

Then Bob gave her a pair of old-timey headphones with a jack plug and ridiculously good audio quality. It could cancel out even the outbursts of her mother whenever her shrill screaming filled the mansion from basement to attic, resonating off the walls, the soundwaves stabbing into Ashe’s eardrums until her head started aching. Bob earned her trust that day and her loyalty too – once won, forever be blessed with, for better or for worse. Unwavering. It is the only way Ashe knows how to function. 

“You’re sure I’ll be unclockable?” 

“I’m positive,” Bob says without looking up. “We are going to jam the security system non-stop. They won’t even notice a thing. Is that what worries you?”

“I don’t want to cause a scene, that’s all,” Ashe says and shrugs. “I guess the police swarming the hotel would be bad form.”

“It sounds like you want a second date,” Bob notes and resumes humming his song that Ashe finally recognises as something by The Doors.

“I just want our first date to go well.”

Bob mimics the bass line of “Riders On The Storm” as he returns Ashe’s gaze. His face is as blank as ever, but it still makes her cross her arms over her chest in defence.

“Hell yeah, I want a second date,” Ashe admits. “Mind your own business.”

***

Their hotel room is an ostentatious eyesore designed during the neo-baroque craze that swept Europe twenty-or-so years ago, making people believe that ornate stuccos and faux marble were the height of interior design. As she is lying on top of their queen-sized bed, her feet clad in cowboy boots dangling off the side, waiting for Angela to finish cooking her coffee, Ashe feels like how she imagines one of Louis XIV’s mistresses could’ve felt. Stuck in the most unnecessarily opulent stand-by mode. 

“The bathtub has fifteen different massage programs,” Ashe reads from the digital pamphlet they got from the receptionist. “I hope it is just the jets and it doesn’t have little robotic arms or something.”

“Too creepy?” Angela says and pushes a button on the coffeemaker. It lets out a dismayed whir and then fires off a series of beeps without doing anything productive.

“If you share almost every waking moment of your life with an omnic guy,” Ashe says and looks up from her phone to stare at Angela’s back, taut from barely restrained fury, the struggle to will coffee into existence manifesting in the saddest sigh she’s ever heard, “you start to worry that everything around you has feelings you can accidentally hurt.”

“Well, this piece of junk is definitely sentient,” Angela says and then checks the water tank, “and it enjoys wasting my time.”

Ashe thinks that her smile, awarded to Angela’s nape, must look silly and every bit as smitten as she feels. She gets up from the bed and jogs over to the kitchen nook to put a hand on Angela’s lower back (a gesture perhaps too romantic and familiar but she doesn’t want to give too much weight to it) before she breaks something.

“Amélie got me this exact model,” she supplies, and she doesn’t miss Angela’s spine stiffening and the way her fingers twitch at the mention of her name. Like a curse word to a good Baptist. Still, she trudges on. “She said she wanted to buy something that looked like the control room of a nuclear power plant.”

“I think this one has more buttons than the cockpit of an old-school fighter jet,” Angela quips, and Ashe can feel her muscles relax under her touch. “Please, don’t make a cockpit joke.”

“I wasn’t going to”–Angela shoots her a glance equal parts unimpressed and challenging, one eyebrow raised high, just like how Amélie would do, eerily uncanny–“Fine, I _was_ , and it would’ve been hilarious too, but now the moment is ruined.”

Angela presses herself into Ashe’s half embrace to lay a small kiss on her jaw and says, “Please, be good to me and make me the strongest espresso this thing can handle. I don’t think I can survive an entire day of mingling on vending machine coffee.”

Ashe likes this. She likes the domesticity. She wasn’t sure she would; her relationships have always been fleeting, few and far between, ended either by circumstance or her own self-destructive need to feel secure. 

Loving is the effortless part. Her love is boundless and free and wild, an unrelenting force of nature – like an avalanche, once jolted into motion, she can’t stop herself. This moment has been ten years in the making, her feelings for Angela simmering under the surface, faint but ever-present. Accepting love? Opening herself up like a fresh wound, showing off her innermost flaws and complexes, the very absurdity of her existence? Terrifying, atrocious, way too vulnerable for her tastes. It has been easier to cut ties before they wrapped themselves around her throat and tightened to suffocation. 

Ashe only nods and then proceeds to fill the tank with water and run the basic cleaning program. She waits for the whirring to stop and then says, “Aren’t you any excited about the presentations? The panel discussion?”

“Of course I am,” Angela says and reaches over to fix the crumpled collar of Ashe’s shirt, her knuckles brushing against her collarbone and neck. It is either a simple act of intimacy or a deliberate albeit tame attempt at seduction, and Ashe can’t process either option without wanting to push Angela against the bar that separates the kitchen from the sleeping area. Her emotions have been turbulent for a while, but none of that compares to the intensity of the last week. She used to think of herself as a solitary soldier fighting against the whole world, a lone horseman against a perfect phalanx – chipping off her measly little share but never threatening the structure. Never becoming one with it either. Now, she was given a chance, tiny it may be, and she is a pinwheel spinning out of control, desperately trying to keep her arms hugged snugly to her torso, taking up as little space as she can. She is uncomfortably aware that she might knock something over if she is too exuberant, too open, too _much_. Thus, she does the only reasonable thing she can think of: she ignores it all and pours Angela a cup of coffee.

“But this is neuroscience and not genetic engineering,” Angela adds. “So I’m only regularly excited. If it were the latter, you’d have to suffer me forcibly educating you on the subject for five hours straight.”

“You know, I wouldn’t mind that at all,” Ashe says and it surprises her how much she actually means it. “I need to learn new Latin phrases because I’ve already used up my _gluteus maximus_ joke on you.”

“You can use it again. I’ll feign ignorance.”

She watches as Angela nurses her cup of espresso, hunching over the counter with the sour look of someone who is about to swallow an entire spoonful of vegemite at gunpoint (she can thank Mako for that memory). Or, she thinks, how Amélie gets when she has to drink fifty per cent robusta. Angela downs the coffee in one go, as it should be done, and she only shivers in disgust a little bit.

“I’m taking a train to Annecy to go over a few things with Amélie,” Ashe says when she is sure Angela will survive. “I’d like to make sure she is okay”– _And that she still wants to meet you_ , she thinks–“I’ll be back for the gala dinner, of course.”

“I know I’ve told you already, but it bears repeating: you are an excellent friend.” Angela puts her cup in the sink, opens the tap to rinse it, and then turns back to Ashe. She has an expression plastered on her face that Ashe can’t read at all, but it makes her throat itch anyway. She clears it with a cough. “Amélie is very lucky to have you. And so am I.”

“You don’t have to butter me up,” Ashe starts, but her words catch in her windpipe. 

When Angela sinks to her knees, clinging to Ashe’s hips for support, then running her fingers along the side seams of her jeans as she goes, infuriatingly slow and soft, Ashe can’t find the guts in her to play along. She can’t do anything but choke on her own saliva and grip the edge of the countertop, hoping to anchor herself before she floats away. Or collapses.

“I ought to fix my shoelaces before I trip up and break a hip,” Angela tells Ashe’s ankles, then reaches out to pat her calves. Ashe’s knees buckle, only a little bit, and she can’t be bothered with embarrassment, not when Angela looks at her with a face-splitting grin. “At my advanced age, it could be devastating.”

“Oh. You’re wasting your talents, Dr Ziegler.” Ashe’s lungs deflate with a sigh like a sad balloon. Encouraging Angela to loosen up and adopt some healthy humour into her daily routine was a terrible move with life-ruining potential for Ashe. “You really should’ve been a stand-up comic.”

“Right now I’m more of a bend down com–”

“Okay, that’s it,” Ashe says. “I have to go try out all fifteen massage settings in the tub.”

***

Ashe spots her through the window of her private compartment as her train rolls into the Annecy station. It’s only a brief flash of colour, a fraction of a millisecond, but it’s enough. She could pick her out in any crowd. 

_That’s because I’m purple._

That’s what Amélie would say on a good day when she channels her self-deprecation through humour instead of bitterness, but it is hardly the complete truth. Ashe is taken with her gravitas, her ability to own and dominate any space if she wants to be seen, and right now, she is making no efforts to sink back into the shadows. Amélie is an iris in bloom with her yellow skirt rippling around her in the wind and her skin shining in the hot light of noon. She wants to be _experienced_. Ashe thinks if she were to close her eyes, Amélie’s image would just burn itself through her eyelids to land straight in her retinas. There’s nowhere to hide, really, nor would she want to. 

“You look great,” Ashe says once she’s standing on the platform, soaking up Amélie’s presence, and the train from Geneva is speeding away. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in a dress. It is nice. You look...nice.”

There are many better words, prettier words, more befitting a woman of Amélie’s calibre, a whole list of them, perching on the edge of Ashe’s mind and weighing heavily on it. The pressure of honesty is unyielding, but so is Ashe. 

If Amélie is offended by Ashe’s lacklustre compliments, she doesn’t show it. She doesn’t offer much, in general. She is not one for hugs or casual physical affection, her touches and smiles are scarce resources reserved for the privacy of the château or Ashe’s bedroom, but she leans over to kiss the air on each side of Ashe’s face, and she either misjudges or stumbles because their cheeks brush against each other. Amélie’s skin feels icy, and Ashe has to wrestle down the impulse to put her face in her palms and hold her until she thaws.

“You look,” Amélie trails off and then squints, “anxious and a little sweaty.”

“But still pretty damn hot, right?”

“It’s thirty-five degrees, and you decided to go for a leather jacket,” she drawls as they cross the parking lot. The pavement is searing hot; the heat rising from it coils and undulates in the distance, like waves in the open sea, and Ashe is grateful for the thick soles of her boots. “You’re lucky I brought the cabriolet. It has great ventilation.”

“Thank you for caring so much about my style,” Ashe says and then throws herself over the passenger side door of the little black Peugeot. 

“I really don’t,” Amélie says, rolling her eyes, as she turns the ignition. “But you care, and that’s what matters.”

“If you got dirt on the seat I’ll kill you,” she adds and then turns to Ashe to grant her a genuine, blooming smile. 

The country speeds away with them, strips of colour running together with the car, crispy greens and bursts of blue trying to catch up with them as they round the lake by the château, but nothing pops like the yellow of Amélie’s dress against her newly-flushed skin.

***

“Are you sure this will come out?” Ashe asks, leaning over Amélie’s spacious corner bathtub, thinly running black dye dripping from her hair onto the white porcelain and gathering in oddly shaped droplets. Vaguely cubic. “I can handle this look for four days, but if it sticks around, I’ll have to shave all my hair off.”

“A buzzcut wouldn’t be as much of a tragedy as you think,” Amélie muses. “But you don’t have to worry. This isn’t some off-the-shelf box dye – give me some credit. It has _nanobots_ in it.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“How am I supposed to know?”–Amélie starts the shower and checks the water temperature by waving her hand through the stream–“It works better than a wig for undercover missions, and that’s all I care about.”

“Have you ever gone undercover?” Ashe says when the water hits the back of her head. “Successfully, I mean?”

“Not unless you count that time they made me into a sleeper agent,” Amélie says, her voice devoid of warmth, nearly flippant, and Ashe screws her eyes shut. The hot water burns her skin, or maybe it is the electric shock of her own idiocy jumping from her face to her spine and her hands gripping the edge of the tub, singing her from the inside out. “That was a roaring success, wouldn’t you agree?”

“I’m sorry,” Ashe sighs out, training her eyes on the blue and black and white tiles, reminiscent of Turkish baths, letting her eyes swim together with the pattern. “It was a bad joke. I wasn’t thinking.”

Amélie leans closer and then runs her fingers through Ashe’s wet hair, her nails grazing her scalp. Ashe half-expects her to jam them into her skin, but the pain never comes. Instead, Amélie whispers into her ear, “I’m a big girl, you know. I can take it.”

“It is what it is,” Amélie adds after a beat and then turns the water off. “I’d rather you made light of it than tiptoed around it.”

Ashe wrings her hair out and takes the towel Amélie offers her, twisting it around her head in an updo that makes her look like the rich, cougar wife of some magnate on a spa day. 

“Now, I hardly think I’ve been coddling you lately,” she says. “I made you agree to a single meeting with Angela, and you acted like I violated the Geneva Conventions. A weaker woman would’ve backed down immediately.”

“A weaker woman never would’ve asked me out for dinner.” Amélie steps closer to her and tucks a stray strand under the towel. “Especially not after I broke their favourite watch.”

“And my wrist along with it. You always leave that detail out,” Ashe reminds her, and Amélie’s eyes widen, the sunlight dances yellow in them, then the moment passes like it never were. “But I had no idea we’d already met, you know. I would’ve avoided you like the plague.”

“Sorry, _chérie_.” Amélie grabs Ashe’s left hand and pulls it up to her lips. She lays an airy kiss on the inside of her wrist, right where her blood pulses the hardest, and her phantom pain resides. Ashe’s forearms break out in goosebumps. “Aren’t we lucky my aim was off that day?”

“You are a better shot than that,” Ashe says and then chances a joke to shoo away whatever notion is scratching at the back of her throat and tightening her jaw. “One might think you found me too pretty to kill.”

“I missed on purpose. I thought you knew,” Amélie says easily as if it isn’t some grand revelation casually dropped with the sole purpose to turn Ashe’s life on its head, and lets go of her. “But it had nothing to do with your face. It was your hair.”

“My asymmetrical cut threw you off your rhythm?” Ashe says, a little choked up and shaky, trying to play her nerves off as a natural reaction to the cool lakeward breeze on her still wet skin. She rubs her hands together and feigns a shudder, and while Amélie arches an eyebrow at her, she doesn’t comment on her performance.

“From half a mile away your hair looked blonde,” Amélie offers along with a wry smile. 

Ashe’s sigh arrives without warning, and her stomach somersaults off a cliff. She isn’t sure what awaits her at the end of her drop because this is _Amélie_ , volatile as ever, and any conversation with her can turn into bomb disposal. Ashe thinks she is either colourblind or, perhaps, every wire is red by default. 

“You thought I was Angela.”

“She used to wear her hair shorter. Just above her shoulders,” Amélie says. “I used to cut it for her, I think.”

“We look nothing alike,” Ashe says, and she has no clue what she’s trying to achieve with that objection. She wonders if Amélie can detect the defensiveness in her voice too.

“I do see the humour in this.” Amélie puts her hands on Ashe’s shoulders and smooths down the wrinkles on her tank top. “I have very little recollection of her, but it’s enough to know that you couldn’t be any more different.”

 _But we both love you_ , Ashe wants to say, but she bites her tongue. Amélie might not want to hear it, and she can’t risk her pulling away now, not when Angela counts on her support and her steady reliability. Ashe needs to be the link between them, the strongest one in a chain, capable of withstanding a decade of corrosion done by Talon, by Overwatch, by circumstance, by time itself. She doesn’t want to give Amélie an excuse to pull the plug on everything. 

“I suppose there is something to say about cliches and their _raison d'être_ ,” says Amélie as she slowly sinks her fingernails into Ashe’s skin, not strong enough to hurt, but hopeless to ignore. “Opposites do attract.”

“You think we are too different?”

“Too different for _what?”_ Amélie asks, her voice clipped, her tone short. 

“We are going on a date tonight,” Ashe says. “An actual date.”

“You want to be with her,” Amélie whispers and her palms flatten, her relentless pressure dissipates. Ashe listens to her breathing for a few beats, first frantic and then slowly evening out, and watches as her cheeks drain of colour, turning a ghastly grey. Ashe knows that look well: Amélie’s eyes don’t see her anymore. They focus on a spot behind her, through her, past her, flipping through memories like a Rolodex, fast and hurried, skipping some pages. Ashe doesn’t want to lie to her. She probably couldn’t anyway.

“I do,” she says. 

“That’s good. She will be good for you,” Amélie says, her eyes still glassy. “She’s a real, warm-blooded woman who’s up for anything. Isn’t that what you need?”

“What I need is for you to be okay, darling,” Ashe says. “And maybe to not imply that Angela is a slut. Not that there’s anything wrong with–”

“You _fucked_ her in a closet,” Amélie spats. “You fucked her in a closet, and Gérard had to fly to Stuttgart to deal with that nonsense, and he wasn’t there for me when I, when I–”

Amélie’s breathing turns laborious again, and a tremor runs through her hands, curling up her fingers. Ashe doesn’t hesitate. She gathers Amélie up in her arms and pulls her into a tight embrace, holding her heaving chest to her ribcage, her hammering heart to her sternum, her cheek against her cheek. With one hand atop the crown of her head, she binds Amélie’s body while her mind flies to places Ashe can’t follow.

“–and I wanted to have her. Do you understand?” Amélie continues, her whispered words jumbled and thick with her accent. “I wanted to have her as you had her. I wanted to – _je voulais juste la rendre heureuse_. In my dressing room. I wanted to get down on my knees for her.”

Ashe’s fingers tighten in Amélie hair, and she has to squeeze her eyes shut and remind herself to loosen her grip. Amélie’s words are like a punch to her throat, and she can feel a lonesome tear roll over her cheekbones and down to her chin at their wake. It’s either sympathy – remorse for something that never was, or just the sheer, painful exhilaration of knowing Amélie Lacroix. She can’t tell.

“ _Je ne devrais pas dire cela_ ,” Amélie mutters, clearly no longer caring if Ashe understands her. “ _Mais je vais le faire de toute façon....Je vous aime tous les deux._ ”

“What does that mean?” Ashe says and pushes Amélie away just enough to cradle her face in her hands. “Where are you, darling? Are you having an episode?”

Amélie’s gaze finally clears up, the colour returns to her skin with revenge, turning her cheeks almost rosy, and the shivers in her muscles settle down to a gentle tremble in her lower lip that makes her look like she is ready to cry.

“I am happy for you,” Amélie says. “I truly am. Believe me, _chérie_. _Please_.”

“I do,” Ashe lies, and when Amélie kisses the inside of her palm, she allows it.

***

The door beeps, the small light above it flashes green, and then Angela steps into their hotel room, only to freeze right on the threshold. Her hand holds the key-card in midair while her face is taking a long and perilous journey from shock to candid desire. Ashe wishes for little more than a photograph of this exact moment, printed out in poster-size, framed and hung on her wall.

“Oh, you look so gorgeous,” Angela says. “How long have you been waiting for me?”

“Half an hour or so,” Ashe says and laughs. “I’ve been standing here all along like some dick ‘cause I was afraid I’d get wrinkles on my pants.”

Ashe’s wearing white tie according to old-school British etiquette: white piqué shirt, white bow tie, white waistcoat, all tailored to her form like a dream. Her black tailcoat is still on a hanger. She didn’t want to die of heatstroke.

“Do you like my hair?” 

“I really do.” Angela closes the door behind her and turns the mechanical lock. She then stares at her key-card for a beat or two before she puts it back in its slot. “This slicked back style is very elegant. It’s a good different.”

“Do you prefer this colour to my natural one?” Ashe asks and then puts on her non-prescription glasses she got to look smarter than she usually does. 

“I don’t.” Angela grins and starts peeling off her clothes. “I like you the most when you are just _you_.”

“Don’t worry. It will come out,” Ashe steps closer to help Angela unbutton her shirt. “The dye had nanobots in it.”

“What does that even mean?” 

“I have no fucking clue.” Ashe shrugs and then throws Angela’s shirt on the bed. “But I trust my source with my life.”

“Do you think there’s an iron here somewhere?” 

“Huh?”

“For your pants.”

“Am I getting creases?”

“Only if you want them,” says Angela, kissing her jaw, the corner of her mouth, until Ashe tilts her head. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up: the girls are having a threesome conversation. should be fun.


	6. Amélie, again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A study in purple.
> 
> OR: Amélie remembers herself, all her contradictions, all her remorse, all her unthinkable jealousy. Finally. She also remembers drinking an ungodly amount of alcohol.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I totally lied! The girls are yet to talk because I wanted an entire chapter of mercymaker pain and suffering (aka Melodrama). You're so welcome :)))  
> This chapter also features my fave milf, Ana Amari. She was very satisfying to write. You know, after I completely hurt myself with this chapter.  
> spell of letting-the-author-know-people-read-her-fic: kudos to charge, comment to cast!  
> TW: assault and violence? casual alcoholism? very sad Amélie?

_exactly ten years ago_

“Do you believe it’s possible,” she asks Ana Amari, of all people, by the salad bar, satisfying their shared hobby of shrimp cocktail appraisal, “to love two people at the same time?”

Ana’s eyes follow her gaze to Gérard mingling with Overwatch higher-ups whose face Amélie knows but not their name. All chiselled military types with heads and shoulders gently chipped away from marble with a handaxe. Moderately handsome and about as approachable as a balled-up hedgehog. Gérard looks sharp in his tuxedo, his body language open as though he wasn’t still struggling with the aftermath of a dislocated shoulder and a broken collarbone, courtesy of that lovely Talon agent who planted a letterbomb at his office. He must be telling a joke, one at his own expense if Amélie knows him at all, and everyone finds him exactly as charming as she does. Just how he likes it.

Then Amélie’s attention slips, and it flickers over to the pair of Angela and Jesse, standing tall with their backs to the wall, sipping their respective cocktails (two martinis, as usual), Jesse looking bored and Angela a little uncomfortable, playing with the thin straps of her LBD. Angela turns her head, as if she could sense the limelight on her skin, and meets Amélie’s eyes, locking her in a silent staring contest before a grin overtakes her face.

“I assume you mean romantically,” Ana says as she expertly dissects a shrimp. If she caught Amélie, she doesn’t show it. “Regardless, you don’t want me to give you relationship advice. Not with my track record.”

“Perhaps not,” Amélie says and dips her stalk of celery in the cocktail sauce. “But you looked like you were getting... _le traitement de canal_?”

“A root canal,” Ana supplies with little enthusiasm.

Amélie snaps her fingers and says, “Exactly. I came to rescue you with my effortlessly entertaining personality.”

“You’re hilarious today,” Ana drawls around her mouthful. “You must be having a mental breakdown.”

“Is it so obvious?”

“Painfully.”

Theirs is a strange friendship if she can even call it that. It was probably a lapse of judgement on Ana’s part, a vulnerable moment when she felt like an awful mother, and Amélie was close enough to her daughter’s age to be an ideal source of validation. She decided to take Amélie under her wings during one of these bland banquet dinners, chatting her up about the men of Overwatch being either terrible bores or complete buffoons with nearly no middle ground. Then, somehow, they forgot to go back to the polite personal distance of never addressing each other beyond a “hello” or a “good to see you”. 

“It’s the monthly melancholia,” Amélie says and pours herself a glass of sparkling water.

“Bullshit.” Ana snorts out a short laugh. “But you needn’t tell me anything you don’t want to.”

“I don’t even know what to tell you,” Amélie says, and it is true enough. She takes a sip and keeps it in her mouth until the bubbles burn her tongue.

“Does Gérard know?” Ana asks her, and her voice is even and smooth and lacking the edge of judgement. 

“Well, of course. He’s not stupid,” Amélie says. “He suspects, at the very least.”

“And he is fine with it?” Ana eviscerates another shrimp. “With his flock of lovers, he ought not to complain. These arrangements should go both ways. Just my opinion.”

“He is always fine,” Amélie says, and that one isn’t a lie, either. “I’m the only one with a hang-up here.”

“Are carnal desires a bit too human for you?” Ana says. “You thought yourself above this all?”

“Not so much ‘above’, no. I don’t think there should be any value judgement here,” Amélie says. “I merely didn’t expect it to happen to me. Not like this.”

“Sex is just sex,” Ana says. “If he can do it, so can you. You might be overthinking this.”

“I can handle _just sex._ Gérard isn’t the only one who enjoys life, you know,” Amélie counters, and puts her glass back on the bar, right on its coaster. “I can wade through shallow waters without getting my hair wet.”

“Again with the vague–”

“ _But_ if you throw me in at the deep end, I’ll drown,” Amélie says. “That’s how I would’ve followed it up if you didn’t shut me down.”

Ana exhales a slow breath and then says, “That sounds like something you need to tell Gérard, then.”

 _Or_ , Amélie thinks, _I can just never pursue her and then I can pretend that this is still shallow waters._

“Maybe telling you was enough to get it out of my system.”

Ana says nothing, but her thinned lips and her rigid posture spell out the word “doubt”.

“How’s Fareeha?” Amélie asks, and Ana doesn’t seem too happy about the change in subject.

“Still going to therapy, so I’m guessing it’s working for her. Or _hoping_ ,” Ana says and shrugs. “I get a call from her shrink every three or so days. Apparently, I’m the leading expert on her childhood trauma. Having been the cause of it and all.”

“Sounds like excellent fun.”

“It sure is a hoot,” Ana says. “It’s one thing to know that you were a subpar mother, and it is a whole other thing to see the ripple effects of every single misstep you’ve ever taken.”

“At least you take responsibility,” Amélie offers. “That’s more than what a lot of ‘subpar mothers’ ever get to do.”

Ana looks wistful for a moment, only just a moment, then her stoic façade is back.

“You’re a good kid, Lacroix,” she says. “In your own way.”

“Switch out ‘Lacroix’ for ‘Amari’, and you’ll be a leading expert on parental approval too,” Amélie says. 

“And what would _you_ know about that?”

“Touché.”

“You started it,” Ana says and grabs another bowl of shrimp cocktail. 

_almost ten years ago_

The diner is about the size of Amélie’s childhood bedroom in the château, which is to say: it could probably fit a nice California King or whatever the Americans call it, but the waiters would have a hard time circumnavigating it. 

_Chalupas are known to be hazardous around bed-sheets anyway,_ Amélie thinks as she licks green chilli sauce off her fingers, caring next to not-at-all about how she looks with crumbs around her mouth. She credits the three shots of Herradura for that entire nonsensical tangent.

Four round tables take up most of the space, rustic but clean, and, by the bar, swivel barstools stand, looking too precarious to sit on beyond a certain level of tipsiness. Amélie thinks she has long passed that point of no return. Beer brewing paraphernalia covers everything else: mini-kegs, kettles, glass carboys and pumps, proudly displaying the owner’s hobby. Perfect for couples and lonesome suits on a hunt for a quick lunch in their measly thirty-minute breaks, less-than-stellar for anyone else. 

“So,” Angela starts and then stops to let out a nervous little laugh. “I know it isn’t exactly legal, but–” 

“Oh, you finally experimented with those German poppers?” Amélie interrupts her, punching out every word in playful staccato. Her accent is heavy tonight, burdened by tequila, and the weight of all her remorse bursting through her chest and filling up her lungs. “You must tell me all about it, _mon am_ –“

“–I recorded your performance,” Angela finishes, and she immediately rolls her eyes, so hard that Amélie is reminded of her great grandmother and her frequent warnings about eyeballs getting stuck, facing inwards, and children going permanently blind. A gruesome visual meant to discourage her from giving her parents lip. She didn’t need any help with that. “Are you in major emotional distress?”

“Now, why would you think that?” Amélie drawls and grabs Angela’s plate to slide one of her chalupas onto it, and then takes one of Angela’s empanadas in exchange. How anyone could pair up cheese and sugar is beyond her. It must be a Swiss thing.

“That’s when you start pulling out the bad jokes.”

“All of my jokes are bad,” Amélie says as she pinches her single remaining chalupa between her index finger and thumb, trying her damnedest to keep the goods inside the shell. “I’m too rich and too well-adjusted to be funny.”

“For the sake of our friendship, I’m going to ignore that,” Angela says. “What I wanted to say before you decided to get _stupid_ with me”–Amélie wants to tell her that she is always stupid with her, that her brain short-circuits around her, but she doesn’t–“is that I recorded the entire premiere. I risked my freedom and my life–”

“No one has ever received the death penalty for taking out a camera at the opera house.”

“– _my life_ , thank you very much,” Angela continues, her lips now frozen in a permanent grin, her cheeks redder than the chipotle sauce dripping from her fingers, “so now Gérard can still see you in all your glory.”

Amélie’s brain is slow, but not _that_ slow. She contemplates telling Angela that her excuse doesn’t hold up, that she couldn’t have possibly known that Gérard wasn’t at the premiere, that her performative _kindness_ is another tool to obscure the truth. She could do it, she could squeeze some honesty out of her, she wouldn’t even need to apply too much force, but the thought makes her feel wretched. That would be rich, coming from her, the greatest liar of them all.

“ _Glory?_ Truly? Was I that good?” Amélie says instead. 

“I thought you were phenomenal,” Angela says. “But I’m a ballet laywoman at best, so I’m not sure my opinion matters much.”

“It matters a lot to me,” Amélie whispers. “I would like to see myself as you see me.”

“Believe me, you don’t,” says Angela. “My point of view is...embarrassing.”

Angela whitens, as though her words have escaped their cages and set themselves free on their own volition. A woman with less to lose would tease her about her faux pas, but Amélie, in her drunken stupor, soaks up every honest mistake like it’s ambrosia and she is Aphrodite herself.

“Would you like to continue this at my place?” Amélie says easily, willing her voice into steady serenity, despite her blood vessels in her inner ear threatening to burst, and her chest compressing her lungs so hard she could nearly suffocate herself. “I could make some disgusting, greasy popcorn, and we could make fun of the _étoile_ ’s haircut.”

“He looked atrocious,” Angela says. “Even I know that bowl cuts haven’t been ‘in’ since 2065. I don’t know what he was thinking.”

“Come up to my place.” Amélie takes Angela’s hand in her palms. “I’ll cook you dinner. _Boeuf bourguignon_. Forty-five minutes in the turbo crockpot. _Le meilleur repas de ta vie_.”

“Turbo. Crockpot,” Angela repeats and then breaks down in laughter. “Why are you talking about food? We are eating right now.”

“I’m talking about _future_ food,” Amélie says. “I’m French. We’re all about food and wine and sex. Isn’t that the stereotype?”

“You’re so drunk.”

“I’m not too drunk to look at some video.”

“I can just send you the file.” 

“It’s up to you,” Amélie says and drops Angela’s hand. “You know best what is and isn’t worth your time.”

Angela stares at her in silence for the longest time and then nods.

***

She shouldn’t do it.

It is like opening a dam, and she knows she shouldn’t go there.

The flood would take her, and she would end up like driftwood, smoothened down to her core.

She has been dancing around that topic for hours now, and her heart is beating fast in exasperation, urging her to ask the questions that could cause the maximum amount of pain. She wants Angela to crush her soul. Maybe then, she could get over it.

“Tell me about her.” 

The words fall from Amélie’s mouth like the first drops of rain before a thunderstorm, and she can already feel it all brewing: her nerve endings are flaring up, her jugular is pumping heavily in her neck, and her fingers slip on the sweat of her palm. The glass of rosé shakes along with her trembling hands, the wine drawing rings on the sides of it – almost oily, definitely not how good rosé should be, but this is the only bottle she had lying around. Angela doesn’t like the strength and body of a good Châteauneuf-du-Pape. She can’t even handle a simple Beaujolais. Amélie had to improvise, and here they are.

_And yet, I love you anyway._

“Who?”

Angela does this a lot, and Amélie would be lying if she said it didn’t amuse her, watching her squirm in her seat in the armchair, the cushions swallowing her up. Angela likes to act stupid, always offering Amélie a chance to course-correct and bite her words, prompting her to be kind and abandon her advances, to spare Angela her dignity. 

Amélie is a _Guillard_. She knows everything about tact, about politeness, about gliding through life like a light-winged social butterfly, about letting things slide.

When she caught her mother cheating on her father with his young PA? She turned the other way.

Whenever her father lied about business trips and went to casinos to gamble away a fortune? She kept her mouth shut.

When Gérard asked her if she was in love with her best friend? If she wanted to act on her attraction? If she needed to be loved and appreciated and adequately satisfied while he was away? She laughed and shook her head and called it “nonsense”, and then cried herself to sleep once his breathing evened out.

She squints her eyes, tilts back her glass, lets the wine slide down her throat, and then she chooses to employ none of that old tact, not when it comes to this.

“The woman in the closet, of course,” she says. “What was her name again?”

“Ashe.”

“ _Ashe_.” Amélie rolls the name around with her tongue. “What was she like?”

Angela stalls, as she always does, by downing her wine before she says, “It was a one-time thing. We really don’t need to talk about her.”

“And why not?” Amélie presses on. “I didn’t even know you liked women, and we’ve been friends for a while. You can’t fault me for being curious. ”

Angela’s cheeks colour to gorgeous depths, and as much as Amélie likes being its cause, she wishes the circumstances were different. 

Amélie thinks of her jealousy as a freight-train packed with narcissism and selfish, voracious hunger. Something broke the breaks, and now it is propelled forward by its own mass, unstoppable. It is but pure inertia, blasting through her logic and bypassing her reason. Above all, it is deeply unfair. She has nothing to offer to Angela, and yet, the image of someone else slipping behind the barriers she’s been building for so long, touching her body and even her soul – it skins her alive with a dull knife.

“I hadn’t told you because there was nothing to say,” Angela says. “Sure, I like women, theoretically. In practice, I’m yet to like anyone. My preferences hardly matter if they don’t point anywhere.”

Maybe it is only the fog of alcohol – they are about to finish the rosé, they drank several shots at the Mexican restaurant too, and Amélie is buzzed if not drunk – but she wants it to be a lie. She wants their lingering glances to mean something, their touches to have weight, their unsaid words to carry a mutual understanding. She is in love with Angela Ziegler and, in an ideal world, she would tell her too. Her passion would be requited, and her desires shared, their bodies alight with a myriad of electric shocks, their destinies entwined in perfect synchronicity. She didn’t have this problem before. Her private universe only became unbearably flawed four hours ago, and a mystery woman is to blame who was bold enough to do the things she wouldn’t do, not even with Gérard’s explicit permission. It is one thing to moan and groan and _suffer_ in silence from unlived lives and unexpressed feelings, but she can’t cope with _jealousy_. 

She wants to kiss Angela.

She wants to drown her jealousy in her love; it’s a deep and vast ocean with fast streams pulling Amélie down to the bottom of it.

She wants her hands on Angela’s breasts, on her hips, on her thighs, inside her. 

She wants her to come apart under her tongue, around her fingers, again and again and again– 

“Are you okay?” Angela says.

Sluggishly, Amélie’s thoughts come to a halt.

Angela doesn’t deserve to be caught up in her wild rage of a midlife-crisis at twenty-four. 

She wants to snap the stem of her glass in two. Instead, she leans over the coffee table and pours Angela some more wine.

“I’m perfect,” Amélie lies, “and I would be even better if you indulged me.”

“Why do you care so much?”

“Because you are my best friend and I want to know what makes you happy,” Amélie says and samples her drink again, and the light rosé sits heavily on her tongue. Inertia sets in, and she can’t stop her train of thought from barreling onward and demolishing everything in sight. “Maybe I would even like to know what gets you off. Is that too _French_ for you?”

“I think that’s too French even for the French,” says Angela. “I would rather not–”

The dam breaks and the waves crash above Amélie, burying her below, drowning in her own helplessness.

“ _Je suis bisexuelle_ ,” Amélie blurts out. “ _Vous m'a–_ ”

“–I know,” Angela cuts her off, matter-of-fact but still gentle, and Amélie feels herself shudder. “We might be too drunk for this conversation.”

Amélie wants to disagree, she wants to deny it, but Angela is right, as she always is, frustratingly, annoyingly _right_. Still, she can’t be alone tonight with her thoughts and her feelings, because they are already waiting on the sidelines, ready to eat her alive from inside out until she is nothing but a shell of loneliness and desolation. Angela must understand _that_ , at least.

“It’s getting late, and I have to be at the lab early,” Angela adds. “I think I should go.”

“You can stay the night,” Amélie says, and if she sounds desperate, she can blame it on the alcohol. “I’ll let you borrow some of my clothes.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Angela says and puts her glass back on the coffee table. She hasn’t finished her drink. Perhaps it is only Amélie sinking further and further into inebriation.

“This is a sofa bed. I can pull it out,” Amélie tries. “You can take the bedroom, and then we don’t have to share.”

“I don’t want to make you uncomfortable,” she adds after a beat, but Angela only shakes her head.

“Amélie, I...”–she trails off, opening and closing her mouth like a helpless fish out of water–“I’m not uncomfortable. _That’s_ the problem.”

“I feel like if we don’t talk about this now,” Amélie says, “we will ignore it forever.”

“I’m not ignoring anything,” Angela says, and it sounds final. It also sounds like a lie. “I _do_ think we need to talk, but not tonight.”

Amélie’s last plea is her hand stretched out over the table, fingers flexing and unflexing.

Angela doesn’t take it.

***

Hours later, in the dead of night, when the rosé has long evaporated from her veins, Amélie curses herself out. Her mouth forms a string of profanities, a mixture of French and English and Swiss German even, and screams them into her pillows. Just how she likes to cry. Silently.

She shouldn’t have to be considerate; there’s no one around with delicate ears or delicate sensibilities to tell her off in the name of that ancient Guillard _tact_. It doesn’t matter. She is a creature of habit, and habit won’t let her pull a moan or a groan, and certainly not a wail of pure suffering from her chest.

 _I should’ve yelled_.

That’s what she thinks when they shoot her in the neck with something that makes her head spin and her limbs go numb. Her knees give out, and she collapses in the hallway, cracking her head open with swift efficiency. She can’t control the fall. There’s no elegance to it. She can hear the thud, but she can’t feel the pain or the cold oozing from the stone tiles. 

If she yelled, just a bit, she wouldn’t have heard the door lock turning.

Maybe then, she wouldn’t have hoped it was Angela changing her mind, willing to take a chance, coming back to her. What an idiotic thought. She doesn’t even have a spare key.

Amélie stumbled out of her bed so fast that she tripped on the bedsheets and knocked her lamp straight off the nightstand. It was an uncharacteristic sequence of clumsiness driven by eagerness and yearning. It would’ve been funny too, she thinks, if she didn’t end up like this: sprawled on the floor like some roadkill, blood seeping from her temple, wondering why her final thoughts are of Angela and not Gérard.

_I love you, Gérard._

_Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me._

She doesn’t want to die.

Not like this.

Not in a home invasion, terrified and completely alone, her words lodging in her throat and cutting off her air. 

_I should’ve yelled._

She should’ve thrown caution to the wind. All of her feelings – scream their name, let them go, part with them and see what’s left in their wake: the essence of Amélie, unburdened and authentic. 

_I love you, Angela._

_I hope you know it._

_I don’t want to go like this._

And she doesn’t.


	7. un autre que moi

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Angela's anxiety is like a perpetual stew, and she keeps adding and adding ingredients, brewing and brewing, until she drops Amélie Lacroix into the mix. Then, everything boils over.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I lied! Not completely, but a little. Let's all just agree in our heart of hearts that their talk requires an Amélie POV, so yall only get an intro now. Good news: I am already working on the next one.  
> Also: if you are baffled by Ashe? Confused by Ashe? Huh about Ashe? Please consider rereading cause I'm massively deliberate about everything I do and I live and die for foreshadowing.  
> Cheers, loves, enjoy!

_almost ten years ago_

Angela lets her phone ring once, twice, thrice before she switches to speakerphone.

“Good morning, Angela,” comes Gérard’s smooth baritone, and it immediately puts Angela into a chokehold. It’s about as clear as if he was right there in the lab with her, tapping his fingers against his neat pencil moustache as he scrutinises her handwriting, pulling a face at the general disarray of her notes, radiating that nonchalant energy of being _slightly better_ than Angela at everything. The very idea makes her shiver. “I’m sorry. I know this is way too early–”

“Nonsense. I’ve been up since five,” Angela shuts him down quickly, a small voice in her brain telling her that he could call her at 2 AM and she would have to obey his summons. She owes him that much, even if he hasn’t the faintest clue. _Hopefully, he hasn’t_ , she thinks. “How–how are you? Are you back in London already?”

“Yes, thank you. Everything is fine on my end,” Gérard says. He pauses then, and for a couple of seconds, all Angela can hear is his breathing rasping into the phone, slow and measured, until he picks up the conversation again. “Angela...I know that this is a little awkward to ask, and I’d rather not put you on the spot like this, but”–he trails off again, and Angela’s stomach drops–“is Amélie with you?”

Angela should’ve got rid of her hangover while she still could, she thinks, but she wanted to _repent_. Now, yesterday’s tequila and rosé are organising a charity wrestling match in her skull, and all proceeds are going to her migraine. Her thoughts struggle to catch up to Gérard’s words, and he uses her hesitation to push onward.

“Look, I probably know Amélie better than anyone else,” he says, “and I’m neither blind nor stupid.”

“What are you talking about?” 

_“_ I’m not upset with you, all right? I only want her to be happy, so–”

Angela’s brain finally jolts into motion, speeding along the length of Gérard’s broken sentences, chasing down that one fragment that burns a hole into her. Like a lost spark, freed itself from the fireworks, setting a thatched roof ablaze. She can feel her bile rising in her throat.

“Is she not at home?”

“I’ve just said that I’m not _stupid_ ,” Gérard snaps, no longer trying to mask his irritation. “I already called the opera house, and they told me she left with you. Can you be a _fucking_ adult, for once, and pass her the phone? She left hers at home.”

“She’s not here.” Her words are but a sigh, and her phone slips in her fingers. She nearly drops it, along with the blood sample in her right hand. “We did meet yesterday, but I left before midnight. I am not lying. Gérard, this is really not–”

“Not like her, I _know_ ,” Gérard says, and his tone is getting more distraught by the minute, his accent is all over the place, and his calm, deep voice is now painted over by trembling panic. “The flat smells like someone poured Domestos all over the floor, and, and she _hates_ it, you know how she hates it. The fumes make her nauseous and–”

“You need to call this in.”

“Angela, if anything happens to her–”

“It’s going to be fine,” Angela says. “I’m sure this is just a misunderstanding, and she is down at the park playing chess with old men.”

***

_Today_

_July 18_

_(Friday)_

Angela is roused by lips on her shoulders, softer than the call of sleep, kissing her awake. 

Ashe’s arm, slung over her abdomen, tightens just a bit. It’s a light squeeze, nothing more, but it anchors her to Ashe, and it is a welcome pressure, crushing the remnants of her dream gently, maybe even lovingly, until only a vague sense of disquiet lingers on. Her breathing is still shallow and frantic, but she feels _safe_ , and that is way more than she has ever expected to get out of their arrangement. 

_No. Their relationship._

She supposes it is time to call it what it is. They had their date, and it went well as far as Angela is concerned, even if they didn’t get to have that supply closet encore. However, they did kiss on a balcony like a couple of lovestruck teenagers, unable to keep their hands off each other, until someone discreetly knocked on the glass doors and brought them back down to Earth. Aside from that minuscule slip-up, Ashe was an excellent date. She was engaging and funny and not-at-all suave, which worked well for the other guests, who were neither engaging nor funny, but could easily relate to the not-suave part.

Her unnecessarily complicated questions about the nervous system of flatworms and the higher brain functions of bonobos delighted Angela’s colleagues to the point where they all looked ready to pull a soliloquy out of their back pockets just to impress a gorgeous stranger. Then, she let them babble at her for ages, bravely withstanding the sheer, mind-numbing devastation of the strongest nerds on the continent talking about their passion projects. She even laughed at appropriate times, despite no one saying anything mildly funny for hours. Angela would’ve found it comical if she hadn’t spent an embarrassingly long time filtering through all her mental dossiers on primates, as if she wasn’t the very woman already on a date with Ashe. 

_I leeched your Science Mag subscription, and then I read that on the way to Annecy. It had this article about bonobos. Did you know they have a lot of sex? Like a lot?_

That’s what Ashe offered as an explanation, and Angela couldn’t decide which one of them was more unhinged.

“Nightmare?”

“Yes. It’s the usual thing,” Angela mumbles into her pillow. “I think I’m just anxious about today.”

“I get that,” Ashe says. “I am nervous too, you know. You both mean a lot to me, and you clearly mean a lot to each other too”–she adjusts her arm and puts her palm over Angela’s hipbone–“I want this to go well, but if it doesn’t, there will be other times.”

“You make it sound so easy.”

“I know that it’s not,” Ashe says and pats Angela’s hip. Her touch is so hot, Angela can already feel herself breaking out in a light sweat. It is ridiculous. “But I’m not in the habit of giving up on people.”

 _Anymore_ , Angela thinks.

The urge to spit out that word comes out of the blue, and it nearly overwhelms her too, so she bites her tongue and pushes her face further into her pillow. She makes a mental note to mention this to Dr Singh when she gets back, this self-defeating need to lash out at the least deserving. Almost like an intrusive thought. She sifts through her inventory of mental exercises, and settles on one with a solid success rate: she lets her breath whistle past her teeth, counting down to ten, and repeats, again and again, willing her ire away. Ashe, as if she could read her thoughts, and forgave them already, lays a kiss on the back of her neck, soothing away her tension.

“I’ll be only a room away,” Ashe adds after a few minutes of companionable silence, disturbed only by the ebb and flow of their breathing. “The walls are thick enough to ward off eavesdroppers – not that I would, but _you know_ –, but I’ll hear a screaming match just fine.”

“Oh, that’s not on today’s agenda,” Angela says and rolls over to face Ashe. “We are doing that next time.”

“So, I won’t have to jump between the two of you?”

“No, but you can jump _me_ ,” Angela says and lets out an easy laugh, and Ashe’s reaction is worth the embarrassment. 

Ashe only stares at her for a second or two, face blank, redness rising from her chest to her neck, then she proceeds to suck in a breath that makes her sound like a rubber duck getting the life quashed out of it by a steamroller.

“That was awful,” she croaks out between two short spells of laughter (snorting, really), and then reaches over to brush a few stray strands out of Angela’s face, tucking them behind her ear. “That was _terrible_. I’m really rubbing off on you, aren’t I?”

“Well, not right now,” Angela says. “But it’s still early. We have all the time.”

Ashe sinks her face into her palms, and a groan escapes from under her fingers.

“Who are you?” Ashe whispers. “And what did you do to Dr Angela Ziegler?”

Angela doesn’t answer her. She doesn’t know how to answer her. She could tell her that the last few months reignited something in her that’s been lying dormant for ages, and her playfulness, her libido, her desire to take risks are only the symptoms of this change. Or, in her case, it’s a slow restoration of a self near-forgotten, buried under remorse and responsibility. She hopes that not all of it has suffocated in her lungs filled with soil, overgrown with weeds. Some of her might still bloom, she thinks, like a cactus in a desert after the rarest bout of rain, bursting in reds and yellows and pinks.

She could tell her that, but it feels like some heavy baggage to handle, and Ashe already carries so much of her burdens without ever complaining about her back. She doesn’t want to give her a mood whiplash, so she files things away for later, maybe until she is ready to tackle one of Dr Singh’s self-compassion questionnaires again. Instead, she shuffles closer, the bedsheets twisting underneath her (she can almost see the shallow red indentations on her skin), and pulls Ashe into a languid, close-mouthed kiss. 

“Thank you,” Angela murmurs into Ashe’s mouth.

“What for?”

“Just being you.”

“That’s not a tall order,” Ashe says. “Never been anything else.”

***

“Did you just–”

“Must you,” Angela croaks out as she gasps for air. At some point, she forgot how to breathe, and her current state of consciousness can only be attributed to providence. “Must you ask that every single time? Don’t you already know my tells? I think everyone down the hall knows, actually.”

“I do, but I like to hear it from you,” Ashe whispers, and she looks at her with something like serenity playing around the corners of her mouth, pulling her flushed face into a smile that would make Angela bashful if she were any younger or any less experienced or any less naked. 

The Damask duvet bunching under Angela’s back must be some cheap synthetic fabric because it sticks to her burning skin, heating her up even more, and perspiration is pearling between her eyebrows and between her breasts. She can’t be embarrassed about that either. The intimacy of the moment dwarfs her discomfort, and for once, she doesn’t mind this fog weighing down on her brain, fragmenting her thoughts and turning them sluggish. She’s undecided on the technicus terminus, and the scientist inside her begs for some axioms and some hypotheses. Ashe’s fingers, moving slowly as they escort her down from her high, are purely empirical in their approach, and they care very little whether she calls it infatuation, kinship or love.

“Is this some weird power trip?” Angela asks, and she can’t help her laugh bubbling past her lips.

“Not at all,” Ashe says and leans down to kiss her collarbone, then the crook of her neck, then her jawline as it meets her ear, taking her time on her way up to her cheeks. “I just want to make you feel good. I like to know I’m doing a good job.”

“I want that too,” Angela says as she threads her fingers through Ashe’s locks. “To make you feel good, I mean.”

“You do that,” Ashe says and shifts her weight, propping herself up on her elbow, and Angela knows that if it’s not a lie, it’s only a half-truth, an omission. Overheated and sticky Angela may feel, she still misses the heavy pressure of Ashe’s muscles against her and the way her bones jab into her skin, teetering on the brink of discomfort but never crossing over the edge. A part of her is ready to say anything to get that sensation back. It’s the same part that is happy to take and devour, and won’t stop until it’s blindly chewing on nothing. It’s selfish and needy and _hungry_ for everything, from validation to acceptance, from compassion to gratification. Above it all, hungry for that rare moment of self-love that she only gets to experience through the eyes of an honest proxy. When Ashe tells her that she is beautiful and precious and deserving, she can almost believe it. She doesn’t like that part, but it’s hers, nonetheless.

“Do I?” Angela says then, squelching her urges to avoid and gloss over.

“Trust me, I’d tell you if you didn’t”–Ashe kisses Angela again and then she removes her hand–“I’m no masochist.”

“Then tell me _this_ instead,” Angela says. “What can I do for you now?”

“Pains me to admit,” Ashe says, “but I’m a bit worn out. How about we revisit this question tonight, and I promise to think about it?”

Angela takes in Ashe’s face – her eyes growing guarded, the curve of her brows flattening into a strict line, her lips worried under her teeth, whitening. Again, she considers mirroring her and biting her words, putting them away in a neat little box for later perusal, much like how she handles all of her issues, procrastinating confrontations until the problem fixes itself or blows up in her face. She doesn’t want to risk the second outcome.

“Maybe we should talk,” Angela says. 

“You’re right,” says Ashe and, as if it’s a peace offering, she covers Angela’s breast with her palm, giving back some of that warmth. Angela takes it. “We should, but not today.”

It’s a cruel echo, and Angela finds herself swallowing down a sigh. She says, “I don’t want to force anything. _Anything_. But if this is a trauma response–”

“I don’t know if it is,” Ashe says quickly, too quickly, but it is an admission, and it’s a stab in Angela’s chest. “You know where I come from, Angie. I carry a lot of that with me, and I think I’ve so far uncovered maybe half of all that’s wrong with me.”

“There’s _nothing_ wrong with you,” Angela says, and Ashe’s eyebrows shoot up at that. “Oh, _fine_ – your career choices are deplorable, but that’s another conversation we’re going to dodge today.”

“We are already so good at this ‘processing’ thing,” Ashe muses. “After a single date, too. Maybe we should call a–”

“I know your aesthetic is very _old-school_ ,” Angela cuts her off, then covers Ashe’s hand with hers, “but that doesn’t mean you should bring back U-Haul jokes.”

“Do we still have U-Haul?” Ashe turns her hand palms-up and entwines their fingers. “Didn’t they go bankrupt in the ‘60s?”

“I just don’t want you to feel guilty about something that should make you happy,” Angela says, firmly ignoring the U-Haul diversion attempt. “I don’t think that’s selfish of me.”

“Well, maybe just a little,” Ashe says, and her tone is rich with warm humour. “But it’s a good sort of selfish. I appreciate what you’re doing even if your timing is subpar.”

“I care about you, Ashe, and I want you to be fine,” Angela says after a beat. “And with that, I’m officially dropping this topic.”

“Thank you,” Ashe says and kisses her forehead. “I have a feeling we’re going to need all our emotional reserves for today.”

***

Ashe is right about that, of course, like she is right about most everything regarding Angela, which would worry her if she were two months ago. Now, it only fills her with a sense of lukewarm gratitude, muted by the drone of apprehension that has turned her skull into a German techno party. By evening, Angela finds herself thankful that she didn’t try to figure out all the intricacies of their sex life in that one-hour window between waking up and going down to the hotel canteen for breakfast.

Her last day at the conference came and went without leaving a lasting impression on her, except for that one workshop about the latest industry breakthroughs in bionic prosthetics, where she managed to slap herself in the face with a life-like mechanical arm. Hours later, a black eye is already blossoming around her eye socket. It’s still mostly red and slightly swollen with some dark discolouration around the edges, but she has no doubt it will soon deepen and make her look like an amateur kickboxer on a losing streak. 

_An ideal look for tonight,_ she thinks as she dabs concealer onto her skin. She has never been particularly fond of makeup, but applying it now, with hands shaking softly and skin breaking out in red patches of blush, it feels like a chore and a futile one at that. 

“How are we feeling?” Ashe hands Angela the sponge and the foundation, and then she kisses the top of her head before she walks back to the bed to grab the freshly ironed shirt laid out atop the duvet.

“Oh, you know,” Angela says and sighs. “ _Terrible_. If I end up puking all over you, don’t take it personally.”

“Come on then,” Ashe says and drops her shirt. “Let’s get it over with before I get dressed. This is Versace, you know.”

Angela laughs, in spite of herself, and some of her unease dissipates with that. She looks at herself in the mirror, pulls at the bags under her eyes with her fingertips, and then she lets her gaze wander to Ashe’s half-naked form. She is all wiry muscle and suntanned skin, the smoothness of it only broken up by her few scars – all-white scar tissue, elevated and grisly-looking, as though she’s never bothered to have them fixed. It’s easy to find her beautiful.

_We all have our faulty coping mechanisms._

“I’m going to be fine. I promise,” Angela says and puts her makeup back in its bag. “I’m getting cold feet, that’s all.” 

Her slowly building anxiety has been layering lead onto her brain, her head now weighs a ton, and thinking itself feels _exhausting_. She wants nothing more than to lie down on a couch with Ashe and a bowl of popcorn and watch Golden Girls reruns or, perhaps, a documentary on tardigrades. But it doesn’t matter. Ashe is right behind her, nudging her forward with her brand of gentle determination, and she is grateful for that too. 

“Double up on the socks then, darling,” Ashe says. “Cause you would hate me if I let you bow out.”

Ashe rents a self-driving car, a boxy-looking silver Citröen, that takes them to Annecy in forty minutes. Too little time to get over her jitters, but just enough to completely destroy Ashe in a game of _piquet_ , and now, here they are: standing on the narrow pier hosting a single speed-boat, taking in the grandiosity of Château Guillard, and feeling pitifully small in comparison. A light but cold lakeward breeze washes over them, inspiring gentle waves, bobbing the boat up and down, and Angela’s teeth start chattering in earnest. Her lips must be blue too, she thinks. 

“It looks pretty cool, right?” Ashe says, sliding her leather jacket off and draping it over Angela’s shoulders. “With the lights and everything?”

Angela isn’t sure if she would call it “cool”. It is certainly an imposing sight with its sharp angles, dynamic arches, and myriad outdoor lamps that envelope the inky blackness of the water in shimmering yellows and oranges. If anyone told her it was a museum and not a place where actual human beings lived, she would believe them.

“Did Amélie have it restored?” Angela pulls the jacket tighter around her body as she looks at Ashe fiddling with the locking mechanism that keeps the boat moored.

Ashe nods and says, “It’s actually a replica of some other castle in France”–she climbs over the gunwale and then holds her hand out for Angela–“Not like I could tell. I know next to nothing about architectural trends amongst French nobility. I just think castles are neat.”

Angela takes her hand, lingers on for a moment, and then allows Ashe to pull her over to the boat.

“Well, you would,” she says. “The bigger the house, the easier to avoid people?”

“Oh, you _really_ know me.” Ashe tests the ignition, and the engine lights up with a low roar and a familiar blue-orange glow. “I suppose I should be worried, huh?” 

Angela doesn’t know how to feel about that, nor does she know how to take the plunge now that she is at the edge of the precipice, and the bottom seems miles away. It would be safer if she knew what awaits her down there: shallow waters or the deep end, absolution by Amélie Lacroix or devastation by the hands of _Widowmaker_. Perhaps all at the same time, churning and coiling around her, much like the lake turning itself around the engine, swift and almost boiling in its vigour.

She reaches out and takes Ashe’s free hand, and when she squeezes back, gripping Angela’s fingers, she thinks that might just be enough to keep her afloat.

***

Angela snaps her face away from the waves of the lake. They’re inviting in the same vein a black hole would be – promising an empty calm, the cold of nothing, a harsh contrast to the entropy in her head. She didn’t even notice they reached the dock.

“Be good and do a clean hitch, _chérie_. If my boat floats away, you’ll be the one swimming out to get it back.”

It’s Amélie. 

_Her_ Amélie. 

It’s the same voice, the same intonation and playful edge, the exact same lilting accent with a new raspiness to it that should sound alien to Angela, but it doesn’t. Maybe it has always been there, and Angela simply forgot about it, despite the hundreds of hours she has burned away studying her files, thrifting through their videos and pictures, trying to retain an essence of who Amélie Lacroix was. Maybe she once coaxed it from her, or maybe she only wanted to. Maybe she only dreamt about it.

“That happened _once_ ,” Ashe says, without taking her eyes off Angela, and her gaze is a dagger sinking into her ribcage: relentless and inquisitive, and it is full of silent inquiry. Angela could kiss her for it, but she can only nod.

When she finally looks at Amélie, stunning and oh-so-distant, standing with her back against a stonewall, her skin almost blending in with the greys, talking about the ideal way to tie a boat, Angela wants to break out in laughter. 

Her body wants to do the next best thing, however. Her tears are running across her cheeks, washing away her makeup, pooling into droplets on her chin, falling into the very same abyss waiting beyond the precipice. There’s something infinitely absurd about their lives, she thinks. Ashe knows this too, just as she knows Angela lied with a mere nod, that she is nowhere near fine, nowhere near ready, that she might just end up puking, _Versace be damned_ , because she gathers Angela into her arms without question, and Angela is pliant under her touch. 

“Dr Ziegler... _Angela_ .” Amélie’s voice falters, and that stumble alone breaks Angela’s heart, only a little, just enough to hurt, because it’s real, it’s genuine, it’s _Amélie_. 

Amélie’s stilettos click sharply against the tiles as she pushes herself away from the wall and walks the length of the docks until she is but steps away. Her presence is sharp and impossible to ignore, and almost as painful as her absence once was, forcing Angela to inhale fast enough that she chokes on her saliva and tears. 

“ _Ravi de vous rencontrer_ ,” Amélie says then, and she pauses again to stare at Angela’s blotchy face and the black eye that’s no doubt peeking out from under the makeup. She regards her with a look in her eyes that Angela can’t read, and the realisation slaps her across the face, and it hurts way more than the prosthetic arm did. She once knew all her tells. Ten years down the line, and she has nothing. 

“I hope you are hungry,” Amélie adds. “Dinner is ready.”

“You cooked?” Ashe quips as she pats Angela’s hair.

“Of course not,” Amélie says. “Don’t be absurd. I don’t have a crockpot.”

Angela’s laugh arrives at last.


End file.
